Critique of Impure Reason: An Essay on Neurons, Somatic Markers, and Consciousness

CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON

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CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON An Essay on Neurons, Somatic Markers, and Consciousness Peter Munz

PRAEGER Westport, Connecticut London London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Munz, Peter, 1921Critique of impure reason : an essay on neurons, somatic markers, and consciousness / Peter Munz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-96384-5 (alk. paper) 1. Philosophy of mind. 2. Psychophysiology 3. Consciousness. I. Title. BD418.3.M86 1999 128'.2—dc21 98-21781 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1999 by Peter Munz All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-21781 ISBN: 0-275-96384-5 First published in 1999 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America

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Copyright Acknowledgment The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Sections of Chapter 4 originally published in H. Delbriick, ed., Sinnlichkeit in Bild und Klang. Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz Akademischer Verlag, 1987. Used by permission.

Contents Preface Introduction 1 The Silence of the Neurons

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2 The Manufacture of Eloquence

49

3 Scientific Misadventures

73

4 Time, Space, and Memory

127

5 The Pure Pursuit of Impure Reason

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6 A Concluding Postmodern Postscript

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Suggestions for Further Reading

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Index

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Preface

Like almost everybody else, I grew up in the belief that there were bodily events and mental events and that in spite of many theories as to how exactly they were working together, nothing conclusive had ever been proved. I was aroused from these dogmatic slumbers by reading Marcel Proust's work on the search for and the recovery of lost times. Proust made me realize above all that the two are not working in unison and that a theory to show that they do is bound to fail. Next, I learned from him that one's inner subjective feelings cannot be described—not even by the person who is having them. They can only be referred to indirectly by describing the infinite features of the world we are living in so that they symbolize those feelings. What is more, he made it clear to me that the world he was describing in order to achieve such oblique reference to his inner feelings did not stand in a simple one-to-one correspondence to those inner feelings. His feelings were larger or smaller—more loving or less loving, more despairing or less despairing— than the circumstances warranted; and, what is more, one cannot ever tell how much or how little the circumstances do warrant. Our minds are neither bundles of well-adapted domain-specific modules as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Steven Mithen would have it; nor systems of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve problems faced by our foraging ancestors as Steven Pinker thinks; nor, as the recent, widely publicized book by Jan Stewart and Jack Cohen maintains, "figments of reality." They are on the contrary, more or less mildly askew and in varying degrees imaginative verbal interpretations of the somatic mark-

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ers produced by our outsized nervous system and its devious operations. Insofar as we are conscious, we do anything but accurately reflect the world we are living in. This may sound like some form of old philosophical idealism. But in this new Proustian form, I believe, it contains very good evolutionary reasons why distortions and even absences of mere mechanical reflexivity should occur. They are, strange as it may sound, indirectly adaptive because they are able to yield a much needed and wholesome compensation for our oversized brain and its unnecessarily confusing hypersensitivity I have reviewed the problem of consciousness, and, more specifically, the problem of how our neuronal systems relate to what we experience as states of mind, in the light of these realizations. In this sense, this book is an extended commentary on what I learned from Proust— a commentary that led me to reexamine not only the psychology of Freud, but also non-Freudian psychology as well as a wide range of contemporary aspirations known variously as cognitive science and/ or neurophilosophy In stressing our dependence on cultural correctives of the disorienting disabilities caused by our large brain, I may have created the impression that I am arguing on the side of cultural relativism and am joining that postmodern chorus of cultural anthropologists who are disregarding biology and genetics and, in so doing, are inviting us to live on quicksand. I do not intend to do any such thing. On the contrary, in firmly anchoring my theory in biology in general and in neurology in particular, I am merely drawing attention to the need for culture-based correctives. Human nature is the product of universal evolution and every human life the result of its genes. My point, however, is that since the evolved genetic blueprint is too diffuse and not informative enough, it is our biological heritage that forces us to fall back on cultures and construct them by availing ourselves of the very opportunities which the diffuseness of the blueprint is offering. It is not that we are living either by nature or by nurture. It is the deficiencies of our nature which not only compel us to do a lot of nurturing, but also, at the same time, supply the means of doing it, more or less successfully, by forcing us to use our imaginative interpretations of the disorienting by-products of our nervous systems. In the course of this book, I make extensive use of Popper's criticism of Freud and extend it to psychological reasoning in general. In an earlier book of 1985 (Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge; Popper or Wittgenstein?), I had argued that Popper and Wittgenstein are incompatible and diametrically opposed to one another. In this book I am looking at them from a different perspective, in that I am trying to show that one can use Wittgenstein's theory of the construction of meaningful

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language to explain how psychological reasoning, which by Popperian standards falls by the wayside, can be rescued to perform a useful as well as a therapeutic function. Fifty years ago, late one night in the University of Cambridge, I discussed my then embryonic thoughts about how Proust displayed his mind with Iris Murdoch and John Wisdom. Iris Murdoch was vaguely sympathetic and John Wisdom, who at that time was preoccupied with Other Minds, skeptically amused. Many years later, the advent of cognitive science provoked me to elaborate these ideas, and the perverse campaign unleashed against Freud in the wake of the recovered memory debate in the mid-1990s finally pushed me into writing them down. I am presenting them here in as final a form as I am able to give them. I have received much help from many friends and colleagues who have read various parts of drafts of this book. At the end of three chapters there are quotations from the works of Thomas Szasz. Lest they be taken as afterthoughts, I must explain that Szasz's writings, ever since his The Myth of Mental Illness of 1961, have been a guide and inspiration, and that his personal comments, sometimes critical, of an earlier draft of this book have been invaluable. I also wish to thank Peter Webster, John Roberts, Patrick van Alfaene, Anne Munz, Hugo Hoffmann, Paul Morris, and Bob Tristram (all of Wellington), M. C. Corballis (Auckland), Peter Wilson (Dunedin), and Laurie Brown (Oxford) for many critical but helpful comments; Brian McGuinness (Siena) and Philip Hoy (London) for helping me to a better understanding of Wittgenstein; Paul Hoffmann (Tubingen) for deepening my appreciation of language; Paul Levinson (New York) for his enthusiastic support of my case for the genesis of consciousness; and Derek Freeman (Canberra) for his untiring encouragement and a running supply of reading matter. Strangely, I also have to thank three friends, J. W. N. Watkins (London), Anthony O'Hear (Bradford), and Ian Jarvie (York), who did not read any of the drafts but whose bemused scepticism during many conversations has proved both challenging and stimulating. I also thank the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, for their continuing support of my researches, especially my friend Margaret Clark, the Chairperson of the Political Studies Department, for her generous permission to use her department's electronic facilities and Jim Baltaxe, Tim Nay lor, and Adrienne Nolan for their word-processing expertise. Equally sincere thanks to Elisabetta Linton of Praeger for her friendly encouragement and to John Beck and his colleagues for their friendly, efficient, and constructive copy editing. Last but not least, I thank Barbro Harris, the head of the library's reference department, and her staff, but especially Justin Cargill, without whose indefatigable bibliographical skill, care, and support this book could not have taken its final shape.

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Introduction

This book is about our minds—about something we know so intimately and with which we are so indissolubly identified that it seems not worthwhile to write a book about it. When people say they are "out of their mind" or they "do not know their mind," we take it for granted that there is something wrong with them and their ignorance of their own minds. The reality is very different. In reality, we are most ignorant of what we are most assured. Our minds are the last things we know—that is, in any meaningful sense of the term "know." The people who are out of their minds or who do not know what is in their minds or who cannot make up their minds are the real realists. We others are all trying to make do with, or compensate for, various varieties of ignorance. When we claim we know what we have in mind—and this is the crux of this book—we can never check whether what we claim to be in mind of is truly in our minds or not. I am neither talking about lying nor about sincere self-deception. To lie or to deceive oneself, no matter how sincerely, one has to be able to know or think one knows what is really in one's mind so that one can avow the opposite; in the case of sincere self-deception, somebody else has to be able to know what is really in the mind of the self-deceiver so that one can define the deception. I am, rather, talking about the fact that when one avows what one minds, what one is mindful of, what one intends, or what one has in mind there is no fact or event one can point to that would falsify or verify that what one is avowing is really the case. Let me be quite clear

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about this: If one says one is seeing a tree, to take the simplest case, one can certainly ascertain whether there is or is not a tree. There is no problem here. The problem begins when one focuses on the "seeing." Is one really seeing when one is avowing to be seeing? One can check whether what the avowal is about (a tree) is the case or not. But one cannot check whether one is really seeing or wishing to be seeing or imagining that one is seeing or is hallucinating that one is seeing. The seeing refers not to the tree, but to an inner event, and the question is whether there is an event which unequivocally corresponds to the act of seeing. So, in order to verify the avowal that one is seeing, one has to look inside, only to find out that there is nothing to be seen that refers to the avowal and, to be precise, there is nothing there other than neurons firing and signals being transferred across synapses. When we look inside our bodies to check or test, we do come across neuronal events which consist of chemical and physical processes that show up on screens and can be monitored by machines and scanned or made visible in test tubes. Moreover, we notice inside our bodies certain rumbling disturbances which we are obliged to take to be the direct effects of these neuronal events. But such disturbances, though rumbling enough to come to our attention and obtrusive enough to be quite distinct, are not distinct enough to allow us to check whether anything we say about them in being conscious of them is in truth a truthful, let alone an adequate, description of any one of these rumblings. The states of mind we are conscious of are quite explicit, but there is next to nothing in these rumbling disturbances caused by our neurons to be explicit about. So what exactly is it we are conscious of when we are saying we are conscious or we are having a certain state of mind? This peculiar uncertainty as to what it is our states of mind are referring to became a real problem at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first attempts at unravelling the functioning of our nervous system were being made. It came to be noticed that there seemed to be an incongruity or gap between the marvels of the nervous system and our states of mind, and to many people this incongruity appeared to underwrite the old traditional dualism of body and soul. The more people discovered about the nervous system, the more mysterious the functioning of the mind became. But many others hoped that more and more unravelling of the neurons would, indeed must, ultimately lead to the connection between neurons and states of mind. A final unravelling, it was held, would yield enough distinct knowledge about those rumbling disturbances we notice to allow one to decide whether any explicitly formulated state of mind was or was not a true representation of these disturbances. The short answer which will be presented in this

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book is that there is not and that there cannot be such a connection: What we call "mental events" or our conscious states of mind are verbally explicit hypotheses about or interpretations of those neuronally caused rumbling disturbances. There is, therefore, no telling whether any one such state of mind is or is not a correct representation of what neurons are doing inside us, any more than there is a final decision as to which of the many interpretations of Hamlet is the correct interpretation. The text of Shakespeare's play does not provide sufficient information to allow more than well-nigh endless hypothetical interpretations. Given the state of neuroscience at the end of the nineteenth century, all attempts to find a secure connection between neurons and mental events were condemned to failure. At that time the blame was laid, not unreasonably, at the door of our ignorance of neurons. It was because of such failure that Freud invented instead what he took to be a science of psychology which would allow us to probe our states of mind successfully without recourse to neuroscience. It must be stressed, however, that he himself considered such a sciencefaute de mieux. Now, one hundred years later, it is timely to examine his efforts because there are renewed and vigorous neuroscientific and philosophical moves to deliver—after all and at long last—what Freud, after his own initial attempts at neuroscience, had despaired of. Since the present moves in this direction, for reasons not altogether different from the ones which made Freud give up a hundred years ago, have, in spite of so much increased knowledge of neurons, not been fruitful and because the philosophical interpretations of these efforts are deeply suspect, it is important to take another look at Freud's alternative: his philosophy of mind—a science of psychology which would bypass neuroscience. Freud is a key figure in the history of the modern attempt to understand the mind, because modern neuroscience is taking up the struggle, admittedly with better means and greater hopes of success, which Freud abandoned a hundred years ago. His attempt at a philosophy of mind without neuroscience, designed to tackle the mind as it stands, though exemplary, ran into philosophical difficulties of his own making. So, frustrated though we are by the failures of today's neuroscience to cover the gap between neurons and minds, Freud's failure at an alternative must be a lesson to us all. Since Freud stated explicitly that his science of psychology, which he called "psychoanalysis," had no need of philosophy, it must seem paradoxical to use Freud as an example of a philosophy of mind. But Freud was wrong in thinking that mere observation of how states of mind are formed and hang together and transform one another is possible, let alone enough. The notion of observation is a non-notion. Every so called observation is oozing theory, dripping with theory, covered by theory,

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and underwritten or undermined by theory. There are good theories, bad theories, and false theories. We must focus on theories, not on the observations which are derived from them. Freud took it that his psychology did not stand in need of philosophical scrutiny because he thought that his psychology could serve as a metaphilosophy because it would enable us to explain why Plato was an "idealist" and Aristotle a "realist"; why Hobbes believed that men in the state of nature were uncontrollable savages and why Locke believed they were comparatively decent; why Darwin thought we were descended from apes and why Bishop Wilberforce thought we were descended from Adam and Eve. There is a similarity here, which will be explored and dwelt on in Chapter 5, with the later Wittgenstein, who thought that his theory of how meanings are determined by the rules of a language game would also serve as a metaphilosophy because it would explain how in one language game people are, say, "idealists" and, in another, "realists." By this reasoning, though he himself did not put it in this way, every fly could be shown to be at home in the bottle it was in. Wittgenstein, of course, was torn. He also often spoke as if he believed that there was one "true" or "correct" language game and that when two people disagreed with each other it must be because at least one, possibly both, were breaking the rules of the one and only game. Hence, he thought that by making them abide by the rules of that one and only game he could dissipate their disagreement and show the fly the way out of the bottle, even though by his own showing it was so much at home in the bottle. Freud's stance was similar. He declared that all arguments, even those that are claimed to be rational and disinterested, "arise from affective sources." We identify truth with what we like, just as we identify beauty with what is sexually attractive to us. 1 Hence, if one could show how, psychologically, likes and dislikes are formed, one could resolve all arguments and disagreements. I, he added disarmingly have been able to transcend the effects and discover the real truth; that is, what causes people to think that this or that is true.2 Like Wittgenstein, Freud claimed to have discovered what makes people hold certain views and, what is more, that the discovery itself was exempt from the causes that determine other people's views. For this reason, it was not just one other view, but the view that would explain the formation of all other views. Though the affinity between Freudian and Wittgensteinian goals has been noticed, the reasons for that affinity have as yet not been considered.3 They will be worked out in detail in Chapter 5. Seeing that Freud himself never subjected his own findings to philosophical scrutiny, any philosophical investigation of those findings must of necessity be critical because it must be carried out from a non-Freudian

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point of view. But such criticism must distance itself from those critics who are avowedly hostile and who criticize in order to get at Freud and his theories: For example, Frederick Crews turned violently against psychoanalysis, as addicts are wont to do and as Arthur Koestler did when he started to campaign against communism, his God who had failed him; or as Joseph McCabe, a lapsed Jesuit, did when he campaigned against the Roman Church. I myself have no personal commitment and my plan is to be as philosophical as I can in order to distinguish the good from the bad and the credible from the less credible. The core of my argument, then, is a critique of psychology, rather than a critique of Freudian psychology The body of knowledge which we call psychological is something we cannot do without, but it is a body of knowledge which is of necessity highly impure. The argument focuses on Freud because he was the only psychologist whose attempt to purge psychology of its inherent impurities makes any sense. All the other attempts, inspired by the very dubiousness of psychological reasoning this book is concerned with—and there have been countless ones, from behaviorism to cognitive science and neurophilosophy— are attempts to do away with psychology and substitute something else. Freud was remarkable because he took impure psychology seriously and tried to make it pure. His theories and findings are dubious and some of them are downright incredible because they appear to break all rules of viable scientific method. But, as I will try to show, they are dubious or incredible because he tried to force psychology into a Procrustean bed of scientific standards which were fast becoming outmoded even while Freud was at his most productive. He clung to nineteenth-century standards of scientific knowledge which equated science with materialism and determinism. His findings have become doubly dubious since those standards have been questioned and displaced. However, by any standards of science, psychology is a very dubious enterprise in which we all are compelled to engage. Freud's failings and especially his totalitarian claims must be seen against this background of psychology. It is not only Freudian psychology which is lacking in evidential and confidenceinspiring foundations. No psychology, and this is the main burden of this book, can have adequate, evidential foundations. All psychology, not just Freudian psychology, is suspect. Freud merely tried to make the best of a bad job. Though Freud was a master psychologist, he did not or did not want to understand the shaky foundations of all psychological reasoning. At first he thought that some daughters had been seduced by their fathers. Then he changed his mind and thought that they wished to have been seduced. Then somebody came along and said that Freud

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was dishonest in abandoning his seduction evidence and that the daughters really had been abused. And then somebody else came along and claimed that nobody had been seduced by anybody and that Freud had it all made up. Or take the by now ancient case made by H. J. Eysenck against Freud in his Sense and Nonsense in Psychology} Eysenck mentions the case of a young woman who resisted three determined efforts at seduction by her boyfriend, only to have the success of the enterprise presented to her in a dream in symbolic form. Freud, Eysenck comments, argued nonsensically that though the young woman engaged three times in heated lovemaking, she found actual intercourse so shocking that she had to disguise it to herself in a dream. But Eysenck's comments are equally nonsensical. Obviously, Freud would reply, she did find the idea of intercourse shocking otherwise she would not have resisted so successfully three times! Or take a recent comment on Edith Wharton's famous narrative of how a young woman is beautifully seduced by her father. Some critics say that the beauty of the story is proof that she must have known from her own very personal experience what she was writing about. Others say exactly the opposite: They claim to know that father-daughter incest is never beautiful and conclude, therefore, that the narrative, being positively idyllic, cannot possibly be based on personal experience. With all such endlessly similar reasoning we are clearly treading on quicksand, but the quicksand is not just Freudian; it is the quicksand of psychological reason. Many people take Freud's case histories as literature. Though they are very well written and it is therefore tempting to follow this trend, these stories purport to be neither fairy tales nor science fiction. But the claim that they are science like physics and geology stems from Freud's own lack of philosophical finesse and from his consequent misunderstanding of what is and what is not scientific. This book is not concerned with Freud's psychology, but with his unjustifiable claims to scientific finality. These Freudian claims have been challenged often enough. The core of the present argument is that this lack of justification applies not only to Freud's psychology, but to all psychology. The upshot of my argument is that psychology is not a science in any of the ordinary senses of that term. There are indeed many senses of the term, as the different schools of the philosophy of science bear witness to. But psychology cannot be covered by any of them and for this reason psychologists should never be allowed to claim special expertise or be accorded a standing of expert witnesses in a court of law or in any other situation. Those Acts of Parliament which in many countries confer on people who have a degree or diploma in psychology the right to call themselves "psychologists" should be taken to mean no more than that people who have such a degree or diploma in psy-

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chology are people who have such a degree or diploma in psychology. They should not be taken to mean that such people have special knowledge in a science called "psychology," for there cannot be such special expert knowledge. At the present time the question of whether there are psychologists with such expert knowledge is specially urgent because of the widespread reporting of sexual abuse of children and of the intervention in the reported cases of psychologists who claim to be able to ascertain whether the abuse did occur because they have special knowledge about the recovery of repressed memories. In many of these cases the name of Freud is either tacitly or explicitly invoked. The phenomenon of repression and of the possibility of recovery of repressed content certainly stood in the center of Freud's psychology. Critics like Frederick Crews are now vociferously blaming Freud for having taught that recovered memories are proof of earlier repression of what had happened, and adherents of Freud are deriving sustenance from his belief that memories can be recovered. Both sides are wrong in dragging Freud into their dispute, for Freud, in a famous letter to his friend Fliess in 1897, made it quite clear that since there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, one cannot distinguish between the truth and fiction of such recovered memories.5 Indeed, as I shall argue in this book, it was Freud's signal contribution to the way our minds work that one cannot tell from behavior or from conscious emotions whether they were triggered by what really happened or by fantasies. Reality and fantasy, he maintained, are both equally causally efficacious. If Freud were invoked in good faith, rather than to prove a case, his testimony would go to show that one cannot tell from present symptoms whether the seduction really happened or whether it was an early fantasy This, as I shall argue in this book, is the quintessence of his message. It was his attempt to put that message on what he thought was a scientific footing that led to untenable and indefensible claims of certainty and truth. This critical approach to psychology in general and to Freudian depth psychology in particular is very different from the campaigns which have been waged against Freud by people like Adolf Griinbaum, Frederick Crews, Allan Esterson, or Jeffrey Masson. Unlike these critics, I am concerned with the dubious foundations of all psychological reasoning and my criticism of Freud centers on his honest but misguided attempts to make those foundations less dubious by turning psychology into depth psychology. Freud's numerous critics and detractors are not necessarily mistaken, but they are barking up the wrong tree. The best and, to my mind, only construction one can put on Freud's work is that he failed to transform psychology into a science—not because he was dishonest or incompetent, but because it cannot be done.

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Nevertheless, he achieved something less ambitious. He succeeded in practicing what the later Wittgenstein preached. He produced the rules for a more-or-less viable language game which is all one can do if one wants to talk about states of mind. Since it is impossible to determine their causes or the reasons why we have them, all we can do is to learn to talk about them intelligently. Our inability to do more than talk about them intelligently according to the rules of a game is not due to an ignorance which, one might hope, will one fine day be overcome. It lies in the nature of states of mind and their peculiar relationship to the physical operations that produce them. Freud's trouble was that he supposed that the game he had invented was the only possible game. His mistake was not improved by the fact that he built this exclusiveness into the very rules of the game he proposed. As to Wittgenstein, there was real irony. Wittgenstein once remarked that Freud is "full of fishy thinking and his charm and the charm of his subject is so great that you may be easily fooled So hold on to your brains."6 But in the end it turned out that it was none other than the later Wittgenstein himself who produced the explanation why such "fishy thinking" could gain ground and become common coinage through the establishment of a language game. For the later Wittgenstein had indeed come to the conclusion that whether thinking is fishy or not does not matter as long as it is done according to rules and that the only kind of fishiness to be avoided was fishiness without rules. Since in Wittgenstein's scheme of games there is only need for rules but no specification of what kind of rules, there is no fishy thinking that could not be carried out in Wittgenstein's world. All one needs is to devise rules, and this is precisely what Freud managed to do. I think I have detected a kind of symbiosis between Freud and the later Wittgenstein, but am at a loss to decide whether this mutual dependence is damaging to both or to either of them or whether it reflects favorably on either of them and, if so, on whom. The unjustifiable pretensions of Freud have given rise to an understandable barrage of criticisms. It is time to look at the heart of the matter; that is, at psychology, the so called science of states of mind. Psychologists claim that they can trace the etiology of any given behavior to its true source. My argument is that there can be no true source and that no amount of pro-Freud and anti-Freud argument can create one. It is in ourselves that we are underlings. The real trouble lies in the pretensions of psychology, not in Freud's amendments to these pretensions. Compared with these troubles, the detection of flaws in Freud's psychology by Adolf Griinbaum and Frederick Crews and Frank Sulloway are child's play This book is addressed to these troubles and tries to show that not even Freud was able to overcome them. If a car has no engine,

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no amount of fuel will make it run, and there can be no merit in any proof that Freud's attempt to make it run on claret is flawed. One final word about terminology. Freud was concerned with neurotic symptoms and his theories were initially designed to cure such symptoms. Nevertheless, he was a psychologist, not a psychiatrist treating psychotic symptoms. The distinction is crucial, for neuroses are indeed not psychotic and are nothing more than extreme forms of ordinary behavior and its states of mind. Since, as I shall argue, no state of mind can be accounted for, equated with, or reduced to neuronal events, there is, in every such state of mind, a peculiar residue, a lack of a one-to-one correspondence, not only to the world that impinges on our senses, but also to the neuronal events which may or may not result directly from such impingement. Since neurotic states of mind are states of mind which are overreactions or underreactions to circumstances or situations, all states of mind, since they cannot altogether be accounted for in terms of the circumstances they refer to and since they contain features which cannot be exhautively reduced to neuronal events, are "neurotic." By this token, all neurotic conditions are part of ordinary psychology. Conscious mental events always are either overreactions or underreactions. We are always more loving or less loving, more anxious or less anxious, more frightened or less frightened, more hopeful or less hopeful, more despairing or less despairing, more hating or less hating, than any situation warrants. What is more, we cannot ever say how much love, hate, despair, hope, or anxiety is warranted. Although it is often said that men are more afraid of women than is necessary, there is no telling how much fear would be necessary; that is, would be "realistic." It is an essential character of our states of mind that they can never stand in a one-to-one correspondence to the objects they purport to intend, for the very simple reason that there is nothing determinable they can stand in such a one-to-one correspondence to. For this reason, they are always neurotic, and this neurotic quality is not necessarily pathological, but more or less normal. If our conscience does make cowards of us all, it is the nature of our psyche which makes neurotics of us all. Since nobody in this sense can be completely non-neurotic, our attitudes to and our treatment of neuroses as well as all theories about them fall squarely into the field of ordinary psychology. In this book I often refer to people Freud talked about as "patients," because he himself usually did so. But "patient" should read "person," because, since there are neurotic traits in every state of mind, the difference between the Wolf Man or the Rat Man and Everyman is only one of degree. All of them, not only Everyman, are mon semblable, monfrere. Freud himself thought so when he carried his initial therapeutic theories into

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the realm of the interpretation of our dreams, into prehistory as well as into m o d e r n sociology and w h a t he called the psychopathology of everyday life. This book, though it is about Freud, is about normal, not abnormal psychology. Even normal psychological reasoning has to be as impure as the "reasoning" of neurotics. Freud endeavored to purify it; but this endeavor, given the nature of our psyche, h a d to fail. Though it is undeniable that this book is about the philosophy of mind, it must also be stressed that I am writing as a historian about the history of ideas: h o w they come, h o w they change, and h o w they are both handled and mishandled. The outcome of both handling and mishandling is often not the one that w a s intended or is logically compelling. Who indeed could have foreseen that Freud, w h o set out as a paragon of scientific rectitude, would, as explained in Chapter 6, end u p providing a public stage for the anti-science pretensions of postmodernism to strut upon? Habent suafata libelli! NOTES 1. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955-1964), 7: 156, 21: 83 (hereafter cited as S.E.). Cp. H. Damisch, The Judgment of Paris, trans. J. Goodman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), lllff. 2. Freud, S.E., 15: 23. 3. J. Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud, trans. C. Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 8-9; B. McGuinness, "Freud and Wittgenstein/' in Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. B. McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell. 1981), 42-43. 4. H. J. Eysenck, Sense and Nonsense in Psychology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 165. 5. The Complete Letters ofSigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, trans, and ed. J. M. Masson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1985), 264. 6. C. Barrett, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), 27.

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1 The Silence of the Neurons

PSYCHOLOGY AND STATES OF MIND By psychology, blithely, we understand the study of states of mind— how they come into being, how they hang together, how they cease to exist, and how they influence one another. The study consists of making verbal statements about them in such a way that they assert regularities of occurrence, causation, genesis, and disappearance. We assume in such study that the mind is lying ready, waiting to be studied by psychologists. In reality, the mind is a composite phenomenon, made up of neuronal events, inner feels caused by these events, and, as a final outcome, verbally articulated "minds." For this reason, it would be more correct to call the events referred to by psychological statements the "psyche"; although, as my argument will show, we ought to replace that word with a different, more telling term. I propose to reserve the term "mind" for the explicit statements we make about the psyche, so that "having a mind" or "being in mind of" or "believing that" or "feeling that" amounts to doing psychology about the psyche. It is the psyche, the feels, which are the subject matter. The mind is talk about that subject matter. There is, then, our feels or our psyche—how we feel ourselves to be—and there is talk about those feels. That talk is psychology and the subject matter of psychology is those feels. The great and all important question is what the relationship between the way we feel ourselves to be and the way we talk about the way we feel ourselves to be is; or, if

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you will, what the relationship between psyche (feels) and mind amounts to. Any answer to that question must first of all consider whether there is any way in which we can determine the way we feel before we talk about that way so that one can form an opinion of whether any such talk is true. If one wants to consider the relationship between psyche and psychology, one has to be clear whether one can ascertain independently what the psyche is—that is, independently of psychology. Only if there is such independence can it make sense to ask whether talk about the psyche is correct talk and whether there is a determinable correspondence between such talk and the psyche; that is, the subject matter of such talk. If it should turn out that we can have no independent knowledge of the psyche, we must revise almost all of our current understanding of psychology, because it is understood, so it seems, that psychology consists of true talk about the psyche. But if we cannot know what the psyche is without talking about it, we have to conclude that it is not the psyche which dictates what kind of psychology is true, but that it is the other way around. It is psychology that determines what the psyche is like and how we feel ourselves to be. A careful examination of the available evidence shows that while there is a psyche or a feel, it is talk about it which imprints a meaning on it. More than any other science, psychology must be seen to actually create its subject matter. If this is so, the question of whether any psychology can or cannot be correct becomes quite impossible to answer and may reveal itself to be a non-question. At the end of the twentieth century, it can be taken for granted that this psyche and the events referred to by statements about it are in some way or other intimately linked to the material substance of the body's nervous system. I will therefore also take it for granted that there is no further need to suppose that there is a mind-body problem which consists of wondering how two substances—a material, neuronally conditioned set of events and an immaterial, mental substance—can come together and act in some kind of unison. There will, therefore, be no mention of Dualism, of Epiphenomenalism, of Identity Theory, or of Theories of Preestablished Harmony. In order to reach an understanding—to do psychology—of how states of mind come into being, how they hang together, how they cease to exist, and how they influence one another, we have to know what mental events described as "I am happy," "I believe," "I hope," or "I feel," refer to. When I am trying to find out whether you are saying you are happy, I am not doing psychology but am acting like a detective: Either you are saying you are happy or you are not saying you are happy. My findings are true when they correspond to what you are saying. Unlike simple detective work, psychology is after something more

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tricky I am doing psychology when I am trying to find out whether you are justified in saying that you are happy, believing that you are alive, and so on. In doing psychology, I am trying to find out whether you are really happy or really believing that you are alive, merely hoping that you are, only imagining or pretending to be happy, or whether, possibly, you are lying and whether you know you are lying and, if so, for what reason you are lying, or whether, perhaps, you are not lying but deceiving yourself with or without knowing that you are deceiving yourself because, unbeknown to you, you are not really happy. In doing psychology, in other words, I am trying to find out what you are referring to when you are saying you are happy. Only by discovering what you are referring to can I form an estimate of whether you are justified and sincere or lying or deceiving yourself and whether you know that you are doing so or whether you are sincerely deceiving yourself because you are ignorant of the real quality of what you are referring to. In order to do this kind of psychology, one does not necessarily have to be an outside psychologist in the form of another person. In a very important and practical sense, everybody is always trying to be his or her own psychologist. The gist of my argument will be that the events that are being so referred to are the most elusive events imaginable, so that it is impossible to ever establish the truth of a state of mind by looking at what it is referring to. Normally, one would expect to be able to say that "I believe I am alive" is true if and only if it corresponds to the events it is referring to. But if the events it is referring to are elusive, such truth by correspondence to what is being referred to is not available. Of all sciences, psychology has been the latest in coming and is the youngest. This is no accident, but lies in the nature of the science, as I will try to show. There is, however, something paradoxical in this situation. While people have been able to get along without much physics and chemistry for millennia, nobody can ever get along without psychology; that is, without knowledge of what one's states of mind are and how other people keep their's and how they are likely to react to one's own states. In so far as homines sapientes are social beings, they need psychology. Even when they are living in solitude, they might need to understand why they are living in solitude and whether they should continue to do so. Psychology is an absolutely basic science. No human interaction, no social organization, not even solitary human life, could ever continue without it. Theoretical or applied, it is as important as a rudimentary knowledge of the seasons or of the habits of animals and plants. There is indeed no shadow of a doubt that even the very earliest hominids had some smattering of psychological knowledge, and human beings have harbored such knowledge ever since, have relied on

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it, and have practiced it. But they had no concept of psychology as a science with a subject matter. "I have been speaking prose all my life," Moliere's bourgeois gentilhomme says, "and I did not know it!" People have been relying on and applying psychological knowledge all their lives, and they neither knew that they were doing it nor how they were doing it. A mere statement that one is unhappy or that one loves something is a rudimentary exercise in psychological knowledge about how one is feeling oneself to be. The explanation of the paradox that psychology has always been crucially essential knowledge and yet a knowledge which has only been developed self-consciously and systematically during the last century and a half with William James's Principles of Psychology of 1890 as a sort of foundation textbook lies in the confusing nature of the psyche; that is, in the subject matter of psychology. The answer is indeed very simple as soon as one starts thinking about it. In all sciences—chemistry, physics, biology, meteorology, neurology, and so on—there is a subject matter which consists of events and a body of knowledge which consists of words. These sciences thrive and depend on the reference of words to events. Admittedly, there is something deeply mysterious here. How can mere words refer to things and events which are not words? One can see how words can mean or refer to other words, but it is by no means easy to see how words can refer to something other than words. In fact, toward the end of the nineteenth century Charles Sanders Peirce maintained very pragmatically that we cannot exit from the dictionary: The meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation. In fact, it is nothing but the representation itself conceived as stripped of irrelevant clothing. But this clothing can never be completely stripped off; it is only changed for something more diaphanous. So there is an infinite regression here. Finally, the interpretant is nothing but another representation to which the torch of truth is handed along; and as representation, it has its interpretant again. Lo, another infinite series.1

The problems of reference have troubled both scientists and metascientists (i.e., philosophers) for centuries, though it is true that the real thorniness of the problem has been revealed only recently. Newton, Faraday, and Galileo were not troubled by the fact that they used the words "inertia," "field," and "gravity" to mean or signify events in nature which were not words. But they ought to have been, even though it would not have made any difference to their scientific enterprise. As things are, it was left to philosophers to cotton on to the questionability of the old habit. Ever since Frege, this question of how words refer has been the most arcane corner of philosophy and has attracted the great-

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est virtuosi of philosophical thinking, from Frege himself to Wittgenstein and Austin and Kripke. Not only scientists, but every one of us does things with words; but nobody has really been able to solve the problem as to how we are doing it and why we are succeeding. Frege's initial answer, though famously famous, is fairly platitudinous. "The evening star" and "the morning star," he said, refer to the same stellar body and must be understood to have identical meanings but different senses.2 Though the physical impact of that stellar body on our eyes is always the same, the attribution of the words "evening star" enlarges and enriches the neuronal events in one direction and the attribution of the words "morning star" to the same neuronal events enlarges it in the opposite direction. And Verdi's aria, "Venere splendente," from the first act of Otello, further enriches one of these two meanings. Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of words is not derived from their reference (i.e., from pointing to the things or events they refer to), but from their use in any given community; and Kripke argues that we simply baptize certain things by attaching certain words to them and that reference is the result of an ukase. The question is of course important, and attempts to answer it were considered for many decades the hallmark of philosophy. When one surveys the battlefield, it comes as no surprise that quite recently one of the chief virtuosi in the field, who had tried his hand or mind for decades at an answer, finally threw in the towel and declared that the problem is insoluble.3 Such an admission of defeat is neither here nor there. We have been using our brains for millennia without understanding how they function and how we manage to make use of them. Indeed, the more we wonder how we manage to use our fingers or breathe, the less able we are of using them or doing the breathing. As far as such meta-questions are concerned, lack of knowledge is not necessarily a handicap and could even have been an advantage. When we turn to the mind as the potential subject matter of a science, we can make a curious observation. In physics and chemistry there is a very obvious hiatus between the events talked about and the words used to do the talking. The phenomena of inertia, of gravity, of an atom or a quark are clearly not words, but things or events. Words like "field" and "quark" refer to a field and to quarks, even though the meaning of the words has changed as physicists' conception of what is a field or a quark has changed. But it is understood that there are two things, the field and the the word "field." But where the mind is concerned there is no occasion for such an obvious distinction, because the subject matter of psychology, the mind, already comes in so many words. As a result, psychology is words about words. If there were no more, this would pose no special problem. But

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there is more; for the words psychology is about are themselves about neuronally generated events. But since these neuronal events consist of processes which can be described in terms of physics and chemistry, they do not include a guideline as to which words (that is, other than physical and chemical formulas) are to be used about them. There is, therefore, not just a problem of reference, but a problem as to why we chose certain words to refer to certain chemical and physical events. As a result, when we are doing psychology we are talking about words which are about neuronal events. But they are not about these neuronal events in the ordinary way in which physical and chemical terms are. On the contrary, they interpret rather than describe these events, and since the chemistry and physics of neurons do not contain the sort of information that can determine what words to employ, these interpretations are indeterminate, volatile, and tentative. To be sure, psychology, insofar as it is talking about the words which are about the neuronal events, need not be tentative. But it does become a very tenuous and uncertain pursuit the moment we realize that its subject matter, the relation of words to the chemistry and physics in which we have learned to describe neuronal events, is extremely shaky. Psychology is different from the other sciences of nature in which there is a hiatus between words and things. In psychology, by contrast, there may not be much of a hiatus between its words and the words it is about, but there is a real gap between the words people use to refer to their neuronal events and the neuronal events. We must therefore look at the question of how it is that words and neuronal events—whatever their volatile relation may turn out to be—are so linked. CONSCIOUSNESS It was Thomas Nagel who pinpointed the special quality and nature of consciousness by asking what it might feel like to be a bat. He drew attention to the fact that when we are conscious we are in the first instance conscious of a feel which is absolutely specific to the person who is conscious. Hence comes his rhetorical question: What does it feel like to be a bat? Since one cannot as a human say what it feels like to be nonhuman, the heart of consciousness is thus defined as something inexplicable and unsayable. But the inner feel at the heart of consciousness which Nagel draws attention to is only half the story. There is a nuance in Nagel's formula which people have consistently overlooked and which is the other half. To be conscious is not only to feel so, but also to be able to say what it feels like to be conscious. Clearly, we cannot say what it feels like to be a bat. But—and this is all-important— neither can a bat, because the bat cannot say what it feels like to be a

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bat. The saying is the essence of the matter and consciousness and language are inextricably connected. The observation that all consciousness is linked to words may sound like the old view that consciousness must always be intentional and that we call an event conscious or mental when it intends something. But the present observation is very different from the hoary intentionality theory. What is more, the difference comes with a vengeance. When we think we intend something when we are conscious, that something is an object which we could not specify unless we had a word for it. On one side, without the word the alleged phenomenon of intentionality is a nonevent, so vague as not to be worth mentioning. On the other side, once it is worded and identified, the phenomenon of intentionality is neither here nor there, because a statement which consists of so many words is obviously not a natural event but an event which is about a natural event. Intentionality, if you will, is implied in the making of the statement. What matters is the word, not an alleged psychological state called "intentionality" As lonesco once put it, "It is only words that count. The rest is idle chatter." Saussure remarked many years ago, "psychologically our thought—apart from its expression in words—is only a shapeless and indistinct mass."4 And Raymond Tallis comments correctly that "prior to language consciousness is nothing but uncharted experience."5 When we say we are conscious, we are not just feeling conscious, a nebulous concept at the best of times, but are also able to say what it feels like to be conscious. This means that the saying and the feeling always go together because the going together is the essence of being conscious or having a state of mind. We can formulate this paradoxically by saying that it goes without saying that consciousness does not go without saying. If we cannot say what we are conscious of, we are not conscious or do not have a state of mind. The question of whether there can be states of mind we are not conscious of because we cannot remember what we or somebody else was saying when they happened is a very special question which will be dealt with in Chapter 3. As mentioned, we are nowadays agreed that the initial substratum of the way we feel is to be found in the operations of our neuronal system, and we all agree that all forms of dualism (i.e., the notion that there are two substances, one material and one mental) are to be rejected. The question we therefore have to address is not how two different substances can come together, which was the problem which exercised Descartes and Leibniz and countless other speculators. The question, rather, is how neuronal events can usher in consciousness or states of mind we are conscious of having. If conscious states of mind are always expressed in so many words, the question boils down to asking how we find words

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for neuronal events when the neuronal events themselves do not contain instructions as to which words we ought to chose. In short, we have to ask how it is that we can be conscious. While there was endless discussion about the relations of a vague body to a vague mind, until quite recently the subject of consciousness itself was considered to be taboo. Just as the Societe linguistique of Paris decreed in 1866 that they would not entertain papers on the origin of language, there was a silent self-imposed embargo on attempts to speculate how seemingly mental consciousness might arise in an ascertainably material body and how bodily events such as neuronal circuits could usher in or issue consciousness, produce it, or be so much as linked to it. Unlike the prohibition formally imposed by the Societe linguistique, the embargo on the problem of consciousness was tacit but not less powerful for that. It seemed to come more or less naturally and was reinforced by the common habit of assuming that neuronal events or other bodily sensations came automatically and inevitably with so many words or led automatically to so many words which defined a conscious state. This habit appeared to eliminate any conceivable difference between neuronal body events and states of mind. The two seemed to be coming packaged as one, and, if packaged, there was no point in asking how consciousness might arise. If words and the feels generated by neuronal events always come in tandem, questions about consciousness become superfluous. Here are a few random examples to show how widespread the habit was and, in many quarters, still is. First, it starts innocently enough and comes naturally. When we are happy, we say so and neither worry nor stop to analyze whether we really are happy or whether we are merely interpreting a certain neuronally induced feel which can be described in terms of physics and chemistry as "happiness" and whether it might be open to other interpretations. Next comes our purely carelessly colloquial habit of equating the flow of adrenalin with "fear." Similarly, some people are quite happy to refer, interchangeably, either to the presence of acetylcholine or to the presence of a state of mind called "rage" as if the two were one and the same thing with two different names. 6 People who write about PET scans never hesitate to claim that it is "normal anxiety," "anticipatory fear," and the like which are produced by certain activities of certain parts of the brain identified by Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Strictly speaking, however, all PET scans reveal is that at certain times certain parts of the brain are active and that somebody glues words like "normal anxiety" or "anticipatory fear" to the tomographically identified brain event. The tomography itself does not contain such expressions as "anticipatory fear." Patricia Smith Churchland has no hesitation in saying in herNeurophilosophy that ver-

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bal expressions of color and odor and taste have as their "physical substrate a neuronal phase space whose axes are [in the case of color] three streams of neurons carrying information about reflectance efficiency value at three wavelengths."7 Jean-Pierre Changeux unequivocally links the word "pleasure" with dopamine synapses in the hypothalamus and the brainstem.8 Changeux, admittedly, does distinguish between the "cold" information carried by the physical dimensions of stimulus and the "warm" experience of pleasure, but blithely endorses the view that the one translates into the other.9 Pleasure and pain, as every reader of the Marquis de Sade realizes, are not so readily separate as certain chemical events in synapses! Or go to a philosopher like Quine: The old Vienna positivists had no difficulty in believing that sense observation translates directly and unfailingly into formulated sentences which they called Protokollsatze. Quine more or less repeats this easy belief when he writes that "we need as initial links . . . some sentences that are directly and firmly associated with our stimulations."10 Stimulations are stimulations of skin that activate neuronal circuits, but the (semantic) meanings of sentences are not made of neurons, though the words which state them are caused by neuronal events in the language areas of the brain. There can be no reason for the assumption that neuronal events, no matter how aware we are of them or how much they make themselves felt, come ready made with words glued to them. If Changeux, Patricia Churchland, and Quine could be seen to be speaking loosely without explicit commitment to the view that words other than chemical and physical formulas are firmly attached to identifiable neuronal events, let me add examples of advisedly explicit usage. There are people who have turned the loose habit into an endlessly sophisticated theory. Stephen Stich maintains that "belief-state tokens are brain-state tokens" and speaks unhesitatingly of "well formed formulas stored appropriately in one's brain" and calls them "cerebral inscriptions."11 Or take Kim Sterelny, who says that "thoughts are sentences in the head."12 As far as I know, the only thing stored in my head is that jelly-like, sticky, wobbly pulp which we call a brain which consists of billions of neurons and many billions of pathways between them. When Sterelny thinks of beer he claims to have in his head a mentalese expression for beer. What is even more astonishing is that he imagines that there is a causal link from the stuff beer to the mentalese "beer." In my world, causal connections can only exist between things that are isomorph, not between something that is a stuff and something that is a word. If it exists at all, the causal link is between the stuff and some neurons. The step toward the word "beer" requires a leap. The question then is whether neuronal events and the words we use to describe states of mind really come in tandem. Do they always go

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together in a one-to-one correspondence? Can one simply pass from the feeling to the saying without further ado? I will argue that one cannot, and that the hiatus between the mere feel and the saying what one is feeling makes a real problem for psychology and all answers that have ever been proposed as a solution of this problem have to be flawed and are bound to remain so. The correct answer, as I hope to show, is that the words are interpretations rather than descriptions of a neuronally generated feel we are aware of. Such feels, however, do not carry sufficient information to guide us unequivocally to describing them in words. That is why the words we eventually find for them are mere interpretations of them. And if they are interpretations, they have to be seen as tentative and hypothetical. Moreover, and this is where the rub may lie, they are not falsifiable, for the neuronal states or events they interpret can only be described in terms of chemistry and physics so that a verbal interpretation of these states or events can never be tested by looking at that chemistry and physics. To be sure, we can sum up a neuronal event by substituting the word adrenalin for the chemical formula. But such a substitution is a description, not an interpretation of the chemical formula and certainly not a description of a state of mind such as fear. In short and to anticipate, the subject matter of psychology consists of sentences which people utter to interpret inner states they feel and which are occasioned by neuronal events, states which are, as they stand, as silent or inchoate as the neuronal events themselves. As Colin McGinn once observed, there is nothing "sentential" in the fissures and nuclei of the brain that would lead to or legitimize any one specific verbal interpretation. In a sense they are even more silent.13 They are merely felt as heartbeats or churnings of the viscera and are not available for more precise description, whereas the neuronal events which occasion them can at least be described in terms of physics and chemistry.14 Admittedly, neuronal events can be sensed as visceral reactions; as a feel in the solar plexus, as increased heartbeat, and so on. If one could allow the ease with which such reactions and their neuronal causes are verbally identified, the suggestion of Elimininative Materialism becomes very attractive and compelling. If decreased concentration of serotonin at the synapse is "depression," and if it is legitimate to glue the word "depression" to the chemically verifiable event that serotonin concentration is decreased, why indeed should we not eliminate the vaguely denoted word "depression" from our vocabulary and refer to an allegedly "depressed" person more scientifically as a person who is serotonically challenged. I would argue that the attractiveness of such eliminations stems exclusively from the slapdash habit of thinking that words attach themselves readily to neuronal events and the

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somatic awareness these events produce. If we stop the habit, as we ought to, Eliminative Materialism and all so called cognitive science which operates with it falls to the ground. My proposal is that there is no justification for the easy, colloquial assumption that neuronal events, no matter how aware we are of them in their visceral consequences, can be identified in so many words. The point is that the admittedly folk-psychological word "depression" does not just stand for "decreased serotonin concentration," but actually adds information to the expression "decreased serotonin concentration" which is not contained in that expression. It is worth looking at Paul Churchland's comments on the serotonin-inhibition discovery15 "Fluoxatine inhibits the synaptic endbulb's re-uptake of . . . serotonin, with the consequence that the liquid medium of every serotonergic synaptic cleft maintains a more abundant level of that neurochemical. But why this should lift a crushing depression remains a puzzle." It is not a puzzle at all, because what is being lifted is not the depression but the feel we interpret as depression. Serotonin inhibitors do not lift the interpretation. They simply lift what is being interpreted as depression. Churchland is forced to think of it as a puzzle because he stubbornly refuses to talk of conscious states of mind and distinguish them from the mere inchoate feels which are indeed, as he says correctly, the direct result of neurochemistry. Eliminative Materialism maintains that statements of belief, feeling, and so on are reducible without residue to neuronal events. If this argument is turned around, it amounts to saying that the content of belief or of feeling as well as the acts of believing and feeling must be eo ipso glued to the physicochemical events in our neurons they are alleged to be reducible to. If such Eliminative Materialism were correct, beliefs, feelings, intentions, and so on would be redundant. The ground for the view that they are redundant was well prepared by Richard Rorty, who argues that we could imagine Antipodeans who know a lot more about neurology than we do and who are able to indicate which neural fibers are quivering when we non-Antipodeans habitually talk of a feeling or state of mind.16 Rorty concludes that the Antipodeans are better off and expresses the hope that we soon will have similar knowledge of neurology so that all philosophical speculations as to how we arrive at words about feelings when neuronal events contain only chemical and physical information will become superfluous. Rorty seems completely oblivious of the fact that the quivering of nerve fibers, while physically verifiable in terms of the chemistry and physics of neurons and synapses which cause it, is inchoate and actually gains in information when awareness of quivering is supplemented by a number of words which are, however, not attached to it naturally or as a matter of course. Those Antipodeans of Rorty's imagination would,

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in any case, not survive for long because the quivering of nerve fibers does not contain enough information to make, say, a mother grab a baby who is crawling toward a heater. It can, at best, inform her that something is amiss, but cannot indicate what is amiss and what ought to be done about it. As long as the comfortable assumption that words come automatically with neuronal events and that the latter can be exhaustively substituted for the former remained widespread, it seemed that the major question of how consciousness arises was an idle question. The tacit embargo remained acceptable and justified. The happy-go-lucky belief that words and neuronally generated feels come in tandem reinforced the pretense that consciousness as such was no problem. The embargo came to be lifted for an extraneous and accidental reason. It started to be lifted when it became clear that computers, clearly material machines, might be able to perform intelligent tasks and could, when complex enough, be said to be conscious. If there is a possibility of explaining consciousness in computers, the question how consciousness might arise in human beings became suddenly urgent and respectable. As soon as the embargo was lifted, there was an outpouring of books on the subject by neuroscientists, philosophers, biologists, and computer scientists. Given computers, the question of consciousness has suddenly come to the forefront of attention and is taking center stage. The most diverse theories are being offered, because suddenly it is being realized that something more than the easy assumption that words and neuronal events always come together is required. It is best to anticipate a bit. Although we all take it for granted today that all phenomena of consciousness and especially all specific states of mind emerge from the chemically and physically ascertainable and monitorable circuitry of our nervous system, we are confronted by the problem that nothing that can be so ascertained and monitored carries sufficient information to authorize us, not even the person whose neuronal circuits are being ascertained and monitored, to formulate sentences we need in order to construct states of mind; that is, to say what something feels like. There is a gap. How do we cross it? The problem consists in the fact that neurons, no matter how detailed and how accurate our chemicophysical description of them is, are silent, while our speech, which constitutes our states of mind (i.e., what we say about how we feel or what it is like to feel), has to be endlessly and vociferously eloquent. In short, neurons do not translate ipso facto into words; into words, that is, other than the words of physics and chemistry. My argument will be that it is not our lack of knowledge about the chemistry and physics of neurons which prevents us from finding out what

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kind of eloquence would, in any one case, be correct. It is rather the fact that no amount of chemical and physical knowledge about neuronal events w o u l d yield the sort of information w e need in order to know w h a t eloquence to employ. THE INTERFACE BETWEEN NEURONS A N D CONSCIOUSNESS Let us begin at the beginning; that is, with the enormous progress in neuroscience and its findings. We can now monitor the progress from initial stimulations to a certain point in the brain. With the help of scans and other devices and with biochemical analysis, we know how certain neuronal circuits are selected naturally to take in certain stimuli, and how the firing of neurons is interrupted and transmitted via synapses. Neuroscience also can show how the billions of possible pathways in the brain can be activated and transformed into a finite number of actual pathways via dendrites and axons. PET scans have shown very clearly on screens which parts of the brain are activated by certain stimuli registered in, for example, the fingers. We know a lot about the biophysics of the synapses, the neuronal membranes, neuron to neuron and e n z y m e gene interactions, and organelle behavior. 17 One of the most important findings is that there is something in between the neuronal circuits and states of mind. It has been clearly described by Damasio in his Descartes' Error. When you experience what you are about to call an emotion you are conscious, Damasio writes, There is a change in your body state defined by several modifications in different body regions.... Your heart may race, your skin may flush, the muscles in your face change around the mouth and eyes . . . and muscles elsewhere will relax... [or] your heart may pound, your mouth dry up, your skin blanch, a section of your gut contract. . . . There are changes in a number of parameters in the function of viscera (heart, lungs, gut, skin) skeletal muscles (those that are attached to your bones) and endocrine glands (such as the pituitary and adrenals). A number of peptide modulators are released from the brain into the blood stream. The immune system also is modified rapidly. The baseline activity of smooth muscles in artery walls may increase, and produce contraction and thinning of blood vessels. . . . As a whole, the set of alterations defines a profile of departures from a range of average states corresponding to functional balance, or homoestasis, within which the organism's economy operates probably at its best, with lesser energy and expenditure and faster adjustments. This range of functional balance should not be seen as static; it is a continuous succession of profile changes within upper and lower limits, in constant motion.18

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Damasio calls this phenomenon the "somatic marker," and from now on I will also refer to these events, for short, as the buzzes we sense. Let me stress right at the outset that these buzzes or somatic markers have no semantic specification. I will argue that these somatic markers are the point of transition from the neuronal circuitry to conscious states of mind. Now comes the problem. The somatic markers are inchoate; they come without words and can only be described in terms of the physics and chemistry of neuronal events. When Baudelaire, looking in 1857 at Goya's Los Caprichos, remarked that they made one "experience a lively disturbance in the base of the brain," he went as far as one can in referring to the inchoate marker.19 Baudelaire's observation of his lively disturbance in the base of the brain is something like a prelinguistic or extralinguistic meaning. A good illustration of such extralinguistic meanings is the situation in which one wakes up suddenly and has, for a few seconds, no idea where one is. Wittgenstein argued that there can be no such meanings. Strictly speaking, he was right, for meaning derives from language. But in another sense he was wrong; for vague and opaque though these somatic markers are, they do contain something we might call an extralinguistic meaning, for they are noticeable as a churning of the guts, an accelerated heartbeat, or a lively disturbance in the base of the brain. They are vague and do not prescribe what words we must chose to interpret them. But they are noticeable as inchoate, stirring buzzes and might be extralinguistic meanings, however undefined. R. Kirk refers to them as mental episodes minus propositional or intentional content.20 Galen Strawson, on the other hand, contends that we do have private knowledge, by introspection, of more than the undefined feel of markers; that is, that we can introspect privately specific experiential qualities, including both sensory and cognitive qualities.21 This contention seems to be confusing articulated conscious states of mind for which no private access is needed, because they are openly couched in public language and accessible to everybody, with the somatic markers, to which there is indeed nothing but private access, which, however, reveals that there is nothing specific to be seen—at least nothing more specific than, say, a lively disturbance at the base of the brain, whatever that can, precisely, be taken to be. The marker, in other words, does not contain more information than the neuronal events which cause it. If this is so, one has to conclude that the verbal expressions which we use to define the marker and, by defining it make a conscious state of mind which enables us to say what it is (i.e., what it is we are conscious of or what it feels like to be conscious) are expressions which are not dictated by the somatic marker. They have to be seen as mere interpretations of the

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marker. They are mere interpretations because they impose new information upon the marker and do not describe it. Having identified the point of transition from neuronal events to states of conscious mind, the problem begins. The discovery of the point of transition is the beginning, not the end of the problem. How can the somatic markers be referred to in so many words—in the words that are essential for us to become conscious of what these markers are? In any case, since the marker contains no guide to a suitable word, it would be more correct to say what we want to interpret these markers to be. THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS At this moment we must briefly digress to ask why it is that these somatic markers should cry out for verbal definition, a definition that adds something to them and goes beyond the information they provide and which is really a mere interpretation. In other words, why is it that somatic markers tend to be raised to the level of full and explicit consciousness? And why is it that we are capable of consciousness, which, more precisely, amounts to asking why and how we are able to provide the words which transform the markers into full-blown consciousness? If it is true that a verbal definition of the marker adds something which the marker alone did not provide—that is, if a verbal definition which raises it to the status of explicit consciousness is a mere interpretation rather than a description of the marker—would it not be better to leave the marker alone? There seems no obvious or compelling explanation why humans do not leave it alone when all those many animals who must also have somatic markers manage perfectly well by leaving it alone as it stands, unvarnished and uninterpreted. There are people like Chalmers who believe that our ability to be conscious is actually superfluous and that it makes no difference at all.22 Others like Humphrey hold that it is, on the contrary, only when we are fully conscious of what we are experiencing that we are able to take intelligent or appropriate action, especially in social situations.23 If we take the first view, it must remain a total mystery why we ever got to be conscious of anything. If we take the second view, one must imagine that there were social pressures which selected beings that were capable of consciousness. Chalmers must be wrong, because it is extremely unlikely that the ability to be conscious should have evolved as a useless, accidental by-product, like the famous spandrels of San Marco. In any case, when somatic markers are as obtrusive as they are in the highly complex human nervous system, they disorient their carriers and cause damage which can only be controlled when they are transformed into verbally articulated consciousness. The ability to be con-

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scious is therefore obviously adaptive and not a superfluous supervenience. Humphrey is right, but telescopes his argument too much. Consciousness cannot come without language and it is language as distinct from animal signalling abilities which presupposes social life.24 What is adaptive is verbally defined consciousness. If and where it remains undefined, it is a mere awareness which is, as it is in humans, a real disturbance—something which is anything but low key and which is, therefore, a hindrance, not a help to orientation. One ought to insert language into Humphrey's argument and so recognize that the adaptive advantage of consciousness derives from the language which transforms disorienting mere awareness into articulated consciousness. We can take it that somatic markers occur in all animals whose nervous systems have reached a certain level of complexity As long as the nervous system is not too complex, the marker will reinforce any neuronally registered message or signal and lead to direct response. As long as nervous systems are not too complex, the markers can (by force, for these systems have no language and do not need much of a language) be left as they stand. At most they require a nonverbal signalling system which conveys messages about matters of fact. But now look at hominoids or hominids whose nervous systems have accidentally mutated into a very high level of complexity and thus shot beyond the optimum. In such animals, the marker will be too strong to simply reinforce the neuronally registered signal. It becomes obtrusive and virulent. Therefore, it will lead to confusion and disorientation and inhibit rather than promote a suitable response. These qualia, as they have become known, are real enough. But it is rarely realized that taken by themselves they are a damaging and not a helpful phenomenon. Some writers even equate them tout court with full consciousness and consider them as they stand the telling advantage humans enjoy over mere animals.25 As they occur they are standing noticeable but mute and do not amount to explicit consciousness. If the nervous system is too complex it is too sensitive, and, what is more, sensitive in a nondiscriminating mode. Messages come in from all angles. Without a linguistic ability, there is no way in which they can be sorted and the important ones differentiated from the unimportant ones. They are all registered equally, and all produce qualia or markers of equal intensity. Their effects are therefore disabling and disorienting. Take, for example, the amygdala. It is part of the brain's limbic system which humans share with a large number of species. Research has established that it is responsible for the emotion we humans call "fear." Strictly speaking, it generates a somatic marker. In prehuman animals this marker is sufficiently unequivocal to trigger a suitable response. Not so in humans. We humans, too, have an amygdala which operates as it does in

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other animals, but the somatic marker it generates under certain conditions is jostling side by side with markers generated by our large frontal lobes. These other markers inhibit the amygdala-generated markers and any direct response they may trigger because they confuse whatever it is that comes from the amygdala. Here is a good example which shows that though we are in some respects much like the animals we are descended from we are also less lucky because we have a brain which is too large for our own good. Hominoids and hominids who developed this kind of overkill complexity of nervous systems were not likely to have survived for long unless their nervous system had also been able to supply the syntax and semantics of a language by which these markers could be defined and pruned so that they could be transformed into explicitly specific states of consciousness. We need therefore not ask why it is that the markers are crying out for verbal definition. Instead, we ought to realize that those humans in whom such transformation via language was not possible have not survived to leave offspring. SOMATIC MARKERS AND THEIR VERBAL DEFINITION The question as to why the markers cry out for verbal definition could be answered by this evolutionary consideration, but there remains the question of how it is done and what the consequences of its being done are. Neuroscientists, philosophers, and other scientists who have addressed this crucial problem have, as mentioned, tended to gloss over it. In fact, when I say "I am sad," the parts of the brain which light up in PET are in the Broca and Wernicke areas. The emission of words comes from a part of the brain which is spatially different from the parts which light up in PET as the result of a stimulus in, say, the finger. In spite of this, philosophers and neuroscientists tend to gloss over the change in location and consider that the words attach themselves without further ado to the somatic marker. Here is a typical example of how the progress from an object in the world to a state of mind was imagined to go: "A series of photons strikes the photoreceptor cells in my retina. The signal is then processed through four other layers of the retina and passes through the optic nerve to the lateral geniculate nucleus. From the LGN the signal goes to the striate cortex, zone 17, and then through the rest of the visual cortex, through zones 18 and 19. Eventually this complex electrochemical process causes a concrete conscious visual experience."26 The uninterrupted transition from object to conscious experience of the object was imagined to be as smooth, uneventful, and continuous a ride as a flight in a jet from New York to

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San Francisco. The reality is very different and bears no similarity to a ride in a jet. In reality, there is a gap and, like the proverbial progression from the cradle to the grave, the progression is neither smooth nor continuous. The gap cannot be bridged and no amount of pretense that the words come automatically and attach themselves to the somatic marker, thus transforming it from the mere buzzing into a conscious state of mind which can be described in so many words, will help. On the contrary, the pretense obscures the whole problem. I would argue that in the discovery of neuroscience there is a gap that ought to be taken very seriously and that no evasive strategy as to how it can be bridged can stand up to criticism. The discovery of neuroscience bears out a philosophical expectation; that is, it amounts to a finding which is exactly what purely philosophical reflection would lead one to expect. The physical and chemical description of the neuronal circuits which lead to the somatic marker do not contain sufficient information to dictate what words to employ to describe the marker (i.e., to decide which words would be a correct description of the marker). One is therefore forced to the conclusion that the words employed can be no more than mere interpretations of the marker. Such interpretations are imposed upon the markers and any one marker is open to several, often conflicting, interpretations. It has been shown, for example, that there is a wide variety of verbal options available to people who are physically excited by equal amounts of adrenalin.27 One must suppose that there is a similar variety of options for people stimulated by equal amounts of serotonin inhibition. The awareness of the somatic marker, the mere buzz, is a totally inward feel. It is private and inaccessible to other people. But, and this is the all-important point, it is also inaccessible to the person who has the feel. For the feel cannot be pinpointed automatically and as a matter of course, in so many words. Therefore, while it is inward, it is inaccessible even to the person in whom the somatic marker is occuring. It is therefore no use to imagine that at least the person in whom it occurs "knows" what words to use to transform it into a state of mind and that he or she can tell what would be the right word. The marker by itself does not, pace cognitive science, amount to a mental representation on which computations can be performed, for a mental representation ought to be, if it is a representation, capable of verbal description. The person in whom it is occurring does not know which words to chose any more than an outside observer. The marker is a truly subjective, private, and inaccessible awareness. It simply makes the person in whom it is occurring aware that something ought to be said about it. It does not contain enough information to indicate what ought to be said about it. In short, neither the private access to the feel nor intro-

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spection helps to bring about the transformation of the awareness of a marker into a state of mind. To be sure, private access and introspection is possible. But it yields nothing, or nothing much more than awareness of the marker; for example, something like Baudelaire's disturbance in the base of the brain. Nobody other than Baudelaire, by introspection, can find such a disturbance in Baudelaire's brain, but Baudelaire's introspection cannot show what the marker really amounts to. I would argue strongly against F Dretske, who thinks that introspection yields a representation of a representation.28 In reality it only yields awareness of the marker. By the time the marker is transformed into a conscious state of mind by verbal interpretation, introspection is no longer required; for in that situation it is obvious to the person who has the state of mind, as well as to another observer of that person, what that state of mind is. The existence and subjectivity of the marker is a biological phenomenon, but for this very reason the marker must not be thought to amount to consciousness.29 A brief survey of the history of thought about the marker will help to highlight the problem. The somatic marker was thought of and discovered long before Damasio succeeded in showing how it was caused. Let us begin with the earliest clear instance I have come across—the way Isaac Newton thought about it in the 1660s when he developed his theory of color perception: "But to determine . . . by what modes of actions light produces in our minds the phantasms of colors is not so easy, and I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties."30 Newton showed how light is reflected from certain surfaces and how it hits the retina and ultimately makes the recipient of the stimulus call out "red" or "blue." He also observed very correctly that in between the stimulus and the word there is a purely subjective awareness which escapes description and which he called a "phantasm." As the word he chose indicates, he considered that it occurred but that it was of no consequence. He realized it could not be described and that, however one might think of it, it would be so private as to oblige us to realize that these phantasms may not be the same for different people. However, he held that the phantasm, though real enough, made no difference to the outcome. This is why he thought of this subjective feel as a mere phantasm and he concluded his paper on the subject by saying that it was idle to speculate about it and that it neither warranted nor required further inquiry. Soon after, John Locke incorporated and elaborated these thoughts in his Essay on Human Understanding. He first gave a specific example to indicate that the inner experience produced in one man by marigold may be the same as the inner experience produced by violet in another and that one could never tell whether this was so or not because both men would use the word "violet" for violet and

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"marigold" for marigold, regardless of what they actually inwardly felt. He then added, less cautious than Newton, I am nevertheless very apt to think that the sensible ideas produced by any object in different men's minds, are most commonly very near and indiscernibly alike. For which opinion there might be many reasons offered: but being besides my present business, I shall not trouble my reader with them: but only mind him, that the contrary supposition, if it could be proved, is of little use, either for the improvement of our knowledge, or convenience of life, and so we need not trouble ourselves to examine it.31 Newton and Locke both glossed over the reality of the subjective feel and its likely importance as the point of transition from a neuronal event to a fully articulated state of mind or consciousness. They did not deny its occurrence, but considered that it was idle to speculate about it, especially as its presence made no difference. To their minds, the mere stimulus would automatically usher in a fully articulable state of consciousness. As against Newton and Locke, who recommended that we disregard the phenomenon which has since become known as the "inverted spectrum," it is nowadays fashionable to deny its very existence.32 Both disregard and denial are damaging, for they blind us to the phenomenon which, though nebulous by itself, should be taken to be the essential second tier in the triad of neurons, somatic markers, and consciousness. From Locke and Newton the story goes forward to the age of Romanticism, when the table was turned upside down. It now became fashionable to focus on the phantasm, consider it to be the heart of consciousness, and declare that language was unable or inadequate to describe it. When Friedrich Schiller, the German philosopher poet said, "When the soul speaks, alas!, it is no longer the soul that speaks,"33 he meant to convey that real subjective consciousness is ineffable but that the person in whom it occurs knows perfectly well what he or she is conscious of. He simply thought that for such inner subjective consciousness it is words that fail. Like so many other romantics ever since, he did not consider that such inner phantasms no matter how heartfelt, are not in the least what we mean when we think of consciousness and that they might be no more than Damasio's somatic markers. Moreover, the term "ineffable," though widely used, is misleading. It suggests that we know what we are feeling but cannot say. In reality—and this is the heart of the matter—we do not know and the reason why we cannot say is that there is nothing we could know or could say. Next we come to William James, who was the first to observe explicitly that the somatic markers do not come in discrete units, complete with a label. "Traditional psychology talks like one who should say a

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river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. . . . It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook."34 James correctly detected that the states of mind expressed in so many words do not directly and determinately correspond or refer to the events produced by the neuronal circuitry. They are, rather, artificial divisions imposed on the buzzes and, being artificial, cannot be thought to be standing in a necessary relationship to them. However, even James was too rash. He mistook the somatic markers, which he described correctly as not coming in so many discrete units, for our consciousness. In reality, the markers are no more than undefined and undefinable buzzes of which we are aware without being aware of anything in particular. Or rather, we may be aware whether they are accelerated heartbeats or visceral churnings. But neither of these two forms of awareness allow us to determine which words to chose to interpret them. It is only when an interpretative label is added that we can speak of consciousness. By the time such consciousness is achieved, the initial stream has indeed been divided into discrete units. James's correct view that the markers themselves are undefined and more like a fluid stream eventually led to the famous James-Lange theory of the emotions, according to which the neuronally generated markers come first and the emotion follows. Again, this theory has an element of truth in it, except that it sees the link between markers and emotions as more or less determinate so that one could, at a pinch, predict from the neurology of the marker what the resulting emotion would be likely to be. If it is true that the resulting emotion we are conscious of is no more than a free interpretation of the marker, we must conclude that the James-Lange view of the nature of that link is false. Unlike William James, Damasio does not mistake the somatic marker which precedes articulated consciousness for the real thing. But he sees no problem in the transition from the marker to the real thing, and since the belief that there is an easy transition is very widespread, I will call this belief Damasio's Error. The great merit of Damasio is that he sees that neurons lead, in the first place, to somatic markers.35 But he then goes on to say—underrating the conceptual difficulty which arises once it is seen that the markers are produced by the physics and chemistry of neurons and are, therefore, inchoate, unworded, and undefined—that thoughts are "juxtaposed" to them and that thoughts, since they come also from parts of the neuronal circuits, are "concordant" with them.36 To be sure, the thoughts (i.e., the words used as labels) come from neurons—where else could they come from? But why should they be concordant and why should they be seen as juxtaposed to the marker? They do not come automatically, even though their com-

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ing seems unavoidable and biologically adaptive. And since the markers do not contain enough information to prescribe what words are to come, the connection between markers and words or thoughts is a very loose connection, both arbitrary and artificial. It is no more than an interpretation. This indicates that one cannot look at the marker and predict what words or thoughts are about to come. Damasio himself prepares the ground for his own error by the easy way in which he employs the terms "emotion," "feeling," and "thoughts." If one examines his page 134, one gets the impression that, in Damasio's mind, far from referring to different types of events, they all amount much to the same thing, even though he distinguishes primary from secondary emotions. On the same page he also writes that the emotion is accompanied neurobiologically by the somatic marker. A more analytical look would, on the contrary, lead to the conclusion that consciousness of the marker as a specific emotion follows the marker. As it is, Damasio obscures the importance of his discovery of the role of the somatic marker as the interface between experience and a verbally specified emotion one is conscious of. THE HYPOTHETICAL NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS In one form or another, Damasio's Error, like Descartes's initial error, is symptomatic of much thinking on the subject. It is widely assumed that there is a concordance between the somatic markers which are the products of neuronal circuitry and conscious states of mind. And, moreover, if such concordance is not obvious, it ought to be made so, since the idea that it does not exist is too difficult to entertain. Unable to entertain the absence of concordance, Searle thinks that the transition is completely smooth and a matter of course.37 In his view we get a conscious state of pain in the following way: I hit my thumb with a hammer. This causes me to feel a conscious, unpleasant sensation of pain. My pain in turn causes me to yell "ouch!" and he adds that the pain is caused by a specific series of neurobiological events in the nervous system beginning at the sensory receptors and ending in the brain, probably in the thalamus, other basal regions of the brain, and the somatosensory cortex. In spite of the finding of neuroscience that the word "ouch!" is emitted from the Broca and Wernicke areas, Searle proceeds as if there were no gap, although he is wisely silent as to how the transit from the somatosensory cortex to the Broca and Wernicke areas is effected. It depends, of course, on which side of the divide we classify the expression "ouch!" If we take it to be part of the neuronal system that is activated causally by the hammer on the thumb, the expression does not amount to a verbal description of a state of

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pain I am conscious of. It amounts to no more than the cat's reflexive cry when one treads inadvertently on its tail. But to qualify as a full state of consciousness, it would have to be amended to "I feel a pain," and in that case it lies on the other side of the gap and does not qualify as a direct effect of what is happening in the somatosensory cortex. It is an addition which comes from a different region of the brain. Insofar as it does, there is a gap. With a verbal expression which describes my conscious state, the expression "ouch" is removed from the causal chain which was set in motion by the hammer hitting my thumb. For that matter, it is well known that once this is realized the expression "ouch" need not necessarily issue in the description of my state as a pain. There are masochists who might well be tempted to interpret exactly the same feel in the somatosensory cortex as pleasure even though they too might utter "ouch!" Or go back again to the serotonin example. It has been discovered that there are malfunctionings in the synapses which can be described chemically as an inhibition of serotonin uptake into the axon. Without further ado, it is being affirmed that this inhibition is the physicochemistry of a state of mind which people call depression. But the word "depression" is not the same as an inhibition of serotonin uptake. Inhibited serotonin uptake is precisely what it says can be monitored: inhibited serotonin uptake. The words "I feel depressed" are added from a different part of the brain as an interpretation of whatever inchoate feel or marker the serotonin uptake inhibition generates. That feel is undefinable—a quale, if one wants to go along with recent philosophical fashion. But, as such, it has no name, carries no label, and does not contain sufficient information to legitimize the bearer of that inhibition to do more than hypothetically interpret the quale as a depression. The quale is caused by the events in the synapse, but the added information that there is now a conscious state of depression is not so caused. The gap has been covered, but only hypothetically so. It remains a gap which needs to be taken seriously. It can only be bridged, if we want to think of its being "bridged," by taking the word "depression" as an interpretation of the somatic marker. But since an interpretation is always loose and arbitrary, it does not really bridge the gap at all. It merely connects the state of mind we call depression with the marker in an artificial way. In a seemingly more subtle way, Roger Penrose has proposed that the gap is bridged by some special bodily events which transform the mere marker into a full state of consciousness.38 He thinks that these bodily events consist of quantum effects in certain microtubules. Francis Crick differs and believes instead that these bodily events consist in forty Hertz oscillations of parts of the brain.39 Paul Churchland subscribes uncritically to Crick's theory40 It is very difficult, if not impos-

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sible, to figure out what microtubules or oscillations can achieve. If there are mental representations one is unconscious of, one could suppose that they are being made conscious when parts of the brain are oscillating at forty Hertz. But if there are such unconscious mental representations, they can be described by words and are not really unconscious at all and do not stand in further need of microtubules or oscillations. If, on the other hand, there is mere neuronal activity, specifiable as so many firings and so many chemical processes in synapses, how can one suppose that forty-Hertz oscillations in a part of the brain magically transform them into conscious mental representations which can be described in so many words? Are we to think that these oscillations act like a slot machine which spits out certain words which then glue themselves to the neurons so that the end product appears as a verbally explicit state of consciousness? Against such slot machines, Gerald Edelman and Nicholas Humphrey suggest that the transformation of the marker into consciousness comes from a mere repetitiveness or a repeated reentrance of certain neuronal circuits or from neuronal wriggles which are repetitive.41 We are invited to believe in some kind of transubstantiation, and it seems very just that Raymond Tallis, in his The Explicit Animal, has called such and similar theories "neuromythological," for they can indeed be likened to the old myth in which the bread and wine of the Mass is transubstantiated into the body of Christ.42 What is more, there appears no good reason why microtubules or fortyHertz oscillations or mere repetitiveness should do the trick, except that none of these bodily events have as yet been bagged for something else. It is a little bit like Descartes's choice of the pineal gland as the seat of the soul. Nobody knew what the pineal gland existed for and it seemed therefore possible to surmise that it existed in order to house the mind. In all these theories it is noted that there is something extra, something more than mere conductivity from point of entry to the brain. But there is no mention why, of all things, this extra should make us conscious. In a slightly different vein which, however, also borders on the neuromythological, David Chalmers, while insisting that the final outcome—a conscious state of mind—is not all that natural and automatic, argues that it is a sort of supervenience upon the materially detectable events which take place in the neuronal system.43 That supervenience, he writes, does not require the magic of forty-Hertz oscillations or quantum effects of microtubules, but, though it takes place spontaneously, results nevertheless in an isomorphism between conscious states of mind and the objects which caused the initial stimulation of the nervous system. If there is no magic here, there is circularity in the argument. Since the states of mind that supervene on neuronal events, so

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the argument goes, are taken to reflect correctly the occasions that cause the initial stimulus, there must be isomorphism. The idea that conscious states are taken to supervene shows that Chalmers takes the gap between neurons and consciousness seriously. But no sooner has he done this than he takes it all back and moves into neuromythology by saying that the gap is bridged by psychophysical laws which establish an isomorphism on both sides of the gap so that the gap becomes really, in spite of what he has been saying about taking the gap seriously, negligible.44 Chalmers goes around in circles: First he takes the gap seriously and then he claims that there are psychophysical laws which bridge that gap so that it is not really a gap. And when asked why there are such laws and how he has found them, he answers that there must be such laws because without them there would be a gap. Admittedly, this is a novel version of mythology, but it is mythology all the same, for the circularity of the reasoning by which he arrives at his psychophysical laws makes any belief in their existence mythological. Let me return again to Changeux. No matter how seductive his view that "cold information" automatically translates into "warm information," his rhetorical devices disguise the real difficulty. He says that neurons are "recruited" and that "cold information" is translated into "warm information." There is no justification for these rhetorical leaps. Dopamine undoubtedly generates a certain feeling inside the body. But that feeling is opaque, inchoate, and blind, because it is unlabelled. There is no reason why we should simply assume that the term "pleasure" is the correct label. Indeed, as is well known, many of those feelings would respond equally to the term "pain"—hence, for example, the psychological phenomenon known as sadomasochism. Whatever mental awareness is neuronally generated is unworded or unlabelled awareness. The identification of such awareness by the ascription of a word such as "pain" or "pleasure" cannot go without saying, for neurons do not carry labels and their circuits do not flash verbal messages.45 Even though neuroscience has made progress in bridging the gap between neuronal events and somatic markers, the belief that it can also bridge the gap between physical events such as neuronal circuits and mental representations is, given all the considerations discussed, illusory In the view of cognitive science, when we say "Socrates" we are forming a word which the neurons which contain the mental representation of Socrates compell us to perform.46 Once we have a mental representation of Socrates, the step to the word "Socrates" is indeed due to some form of compulsion, because the mental representation presupposes the employment of the word, for the word is already there. The real problem comes before we have the mental representation. How do we transform the neuronal events stimulated or occasioned by the

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presence of that Greek philosopher into a mental representation based on words? The answer is simple and confounds the claims of cognitive science: There is no easy bridge from those neuronal events and their somatic marker to a verbally labelled mental representation, and most certainly no compulsion. The euphoria of some contemporary neuroscience was due to important discoveries. It was one thing to discover that there are certain areas of the brain concerned with vision and that injury to a set of cortical regions located in the dorsal (parietal) region of the cortex was critical for surveillance, attention, and arousal (its injury results in indifference and in the "loss of a sense of caring about one's own person").47 But it is quite another to conclude from such evidence that there is a oneto-one correspondence between neuronal events and the verbal designation of the inchoate feelings they produce. We really are confronted not just with two kinds of events, neuronal circuits and conscious states of mind, but with three sets of events: First, there are the neuronal circuits; second, the inchoate or blind feeling, the somatic marker, they generate; and, third, the verbal identification of that opaque feeling as "orange" or "pain." The first two events are indeed, as the evidence now indicates, very intimately linked. But the third type of event is a hypothetical superimposition and cannot stand in a causal relationship to the two other types. It is conceivable that one day we will get an exhaustive description of all neuronal events that take place during the entire lifespan of every single human being. This will give us a better understanding of the buzzes and moods or somatic markers they generate because, beyond a certain stage of complexity, the neuronal events can be "felt"; not felt by a mind or the pineal gland or any ghost or homunculus inside the body, but felt in the sense of being noticeably obtrusive stirrings or of making themselves virulently felt. The language I have to use—I have, for example, to say "noticeable"—tends to suggest that there is somebody else that is doing the noticing, and, in making such a suggestion, confuses the issue. One has to try to discount the linguistic metaphor one has to use. To come back to the neuronal events, their exhaustive description in terms of physics and chemistry will not get us very far. What is being felt is a silent stirring. There is an almost inexhaustible range of verbal interpretations and identifications of those stirrings and for this reason no amount of exhaustive description of neuronal events can lead to an exhaustive list of possible verbal articulations of the moods they produce. The hope that neuroscience will one day lead straight to and include a description of states of mind was fed by the unwarranted slapdash assumption that the feelings generated by neuronal events, feelings we are aware of, come ready made with verbal labels and that their articulation presents no further problem.

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THE THREE-TIERED NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS Against all these habits of running neuronal events and words together as if they were glued to each other as a matter of course so that the phenomenon of consciousness takes place automatically, and against those theories which invoke magic to bring about the transubstantiation of neuronal events into conscious states of mind, I would like to propose that we think of the situation as consisting of three elements which are related to each other in different ways. We are not either conscious or not. Consciousness, on the contrary, is slowly built up in three tiers. We should understand it as a composite phenomenon, the several parts of which are related to each other in very different ways. There are the neuronal events, however they are set in motion; then there are the somatic markers we are aware of but which we cannot describe in so many words and which, therefore, do not amount to states of mind; and, finally, there are verbally defined states of mind or complete consciousness. We can thus understand the progression from neuronal circuits to states of mind without resorting to magic and without taking it for granted that the progression is automatic and a matter of course. The relations which obtain between these three elements are very different from each other. There is, first, a real causal relation between the neuronal events and the somatic marker. We notice the marker because it "shakes" us. Such shaking is an obtrusive awareness and could be said to be self-luminous without actually illuminating anything beyond the fact that it is virulently noticeable. But the marker proceeds directly from the physics and chemistry of the neuronal events and does not contain more information than they do. The so called shaking can be accounted for in the terms of the chemistry and physics we use to describe and track the neuronal circuitry. The relation between the marker and the state of mind which comes in so many words is completely different. It is not causal, but interpretative. Being interpretative, it is always tentative and hypothetical. While it is an interpretation, there is no way in which we could tell whether such an interpretation is correct or not. The marker is as silent as the neurons themselves. But the state of mind is eloquent and, being eloquent, it provides information which it imposes on the marker but which it does not derive from the marker.48 We cannot look at the marker and decide by looking whether any one interpretation is correct. The most we might be able to do is to decide, tentatively again, whether one interpretation is better than another. If this account of what really happens is correct—as opposed to both the easy assumption that words come automatically so that they can be taken for granted and the invocation of magic—it

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should be seen to run parallel to an older distinction between mere moods and fully articulated emotions. A mood is very unspecific and comes and goes and can most probably be linked to neuronal events. This point is well brought out by W. N. Morris.49 Long ago, C. A. Ruckmick put it in this way: "[Mood] has no particular cognitive element. We are often at a loss to say toward whom or what it is directed.... There is also generally no cognitive impulse about it. It does not lend itself to any definite action."50 Nico H. Frijda notes that moods are "diffuse" and "global."51 Whereas moods are unspecific, emotions are specific because they are articulated in words. We are aware of moods, but cannot say what exactly they are, because they are as silent as the neurons that cause them. When we identify them as this or that emotion, on the other hand, we are making a statement about them; but a statement which cannot be verified by looking at the awareness. For the awareness just is. It has no features we can identify it by. For this reason, any articulated emotion remains hanging in the air. The articulation refers to or points to the awareness, but since the awareness is unidentifiable, the articulated statement which describes the emotion must always be purely hypothetical. One can identify a mood as this or that and, in so doing, turn it into an emotion. But one can never verify the identification and therefore never be sure that any one identification of a mood as this or that emotion is correct. Nico H. Frijda argues that emotions result from an encounter between an event and an individual concern.52 We ought to amend this argument: The individual concern is the somatic marker, and that marker is the interface between the neuronal circuitry which registers the event and the emotion which articulates it. But in the neuronal registration of the event, something is lost; and in the verbal articulation of the individual concern (the marker) something else is added. There is not and there cannot be an isomorphism or an equivalence between what is being lost at one end of the chain and what is being added at the other end. "A mood by itself," writes John Searle, "never constitutes the whole content of a conscious state. Rather, the mood provides the color that characterizes the whole of a conscious state or sequence of conscious states."53 And this is the way Gerald Edelman puts it: "Feelings are part of the conscious state and are the processes that we associate with the notion of qualia as they relate to the self. They are not emotions, however, for emotions have strong cognitive components that mix feeling with willing and with judgments in an extraordinarily complicated way" 54 Jaak Panksepp states that there is a lot of evidence which links emotions to neurobiological facts. There is, indeed, "considerable knowl-

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edge about the neuronal circuitries of rage, fear, separation distress, maternal nurturance, anticipatory eagerness and various facets of sexuality in . . . animals."55 Pankseep is here confusing moods with emotions. The chemicophysical circuits he is talking about generate certain moods. The identification of those moods as emotions of rage or fear, let alone of maternal nurturance, is completely unjustified because it depends on the assignment of verbal labels to these moods. He concludes his paper with an explicit reiteration of this confusion by writing that "we can understand moods and emotions at a mechanistic level," though he does add that there is reason for concern.56 As far as articulatable emotions are concerned, R. B. Zajonc writes, there are very good reasons why "no neural programs... have been found."571 would add that none can be found because there are none, at least no direct, chemically or physically ascertainable ones. The paths from neurons to conscious emotions go via the interface, Damasio's somatic markers. If the interface is left out, the transformation of neuronal events into emotions remains a mystery. It is remarkable how often that interface, essential for the transit from the physics and chemistry of neurons to the mentality of conscious emotions, is either neglected or ignored so that even neuroscientists are at a loss how to account for the genesis of articulate emotion. For want of a proper explanation, they then resort to tautology: "A subjective emotional experience . . . results when we become consciously aware that an emotion system of the brain . . . is active."58 To reiterate, the brain does not generate the emotion. It supplies the somatic marker which is interpreted as this or that emotion. The quality of these neuronally generated stirrings we are aware of is present but, being silent, cannot be specified. This is the correct answer to the problem both Gilbert Ryle has been and Daniel Dennett still is wrestling with.59 Both Ryle and Dennett argue that there cannot be a ghost or homunculus in the machine which "perceives" these stirrings. Ryle calls the belief that there is a second person inside the machine the myth of the ghost in the machine. Dennett calls this belief the story of the Cartesian Theatre. There is, admittedly, neither ghost nor homunculus because there need not be such a second person or agent. The stirrings are, so to speak, self-luminous. Many people believe they are conscious when these stirrings are noticed. But in doing so, they imagine something that is not the case. They imagine that these stirrings have definite properties like "sadness" or "pain" or "hoping to go to the circus tomorrow," and, being so definite, there has to be a second person who recognizes that definiteness. The correct answer is that they are simply luminous and obtrude, and have no very specific quality which has to be "known" by a second agent—homunculus or

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ghost—who is doing the knowing. There is nothing to be known! And since there is not, there is no need to imagine that there is a homunculus or a ghost. Above all, there is no need to argue at length, as both Ryle and Dennett do, that there cannot be such a second person. Any subsequent definiteness of what they really are comes later and results from the hypothetical ascription of a word by the very same nervous system that is having those stirrings. Ryle's and Dennett's arguments are not so much wrong as superfluous, for we must bear in mind that the verbal constructions our states of mind consist of do not portray the moods and do not refer to them the way my perception of a table refers to the table or is of the table. They are constructions made by somebody, not somebody's observation or inspection of something. The silent, unworded quality of merely neuronally produced consciousness is well described in a passage from William Cowper: "I perceived a sensation in my brain like a tremulous vibration in all the fibres of it. By this means I lost the words in the very instant when I thought to have laid hold of them."60 He was so used to the discourse of folk psychology that he thought he had "lost" the words. Had he looked more analytically, he would have realized that they were not "lost," but that the sensation "in his brain" simply was silent and that no words were glued to them. Words have to be found for them and any such finding is and remains hypothetical; that is, any word found could be the wrong word. Look at a passage from Einstein: The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements of thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined. . . . The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.61

Thinking, Einstein is saying, is about preverbal thinking, and being a second-order process it can only be a hypothetical description of preverbal "thinking." Or take the testimony of Alvarez: "I know from my own experience that it is sometimes possible to hear a poem before you get the words. And without that inner movement or disturbance, the words, no matter how fetching, remain inert."62 We ought to note that Alvarez does not claim that what comes "before" the words is some sort of message. He says, on the contrary, that it is a "movement" or a "disturbance," that is, something similar to Baudelaire's lively disturbance in the base of the brain which, no matter how obtrusive and how manifest, is preverbal. Such preverbality entails inchoateness.

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There is, however, a linguistic problem here. We can be conscious of a mood and, in fact, we are conscious of the lively disturbance in the base of the brain, of a churning in the stomach, and so forth. The mere saying that we have such a disturbance or such churning amounts to being conscious of it. We are here facing the paradox that when we want to explain that there is an inner feel which we cannot talk about, we can only do so by talking about it. However, such talk about disturbances in the base of the brain or churnings in the stomach or pressures in the solar plexus is clearly metaphorical and does not really amount to talk about detectable matters of fact. These metaphors constitute hints at states of affairs which cannot be described at all but which are crying out for interpretations, and, being unable to be described, contain no indication which interpretation might be correct. This conclusion that there are three tiers is in striking contradiction to the central tenet of cognitive science, the "computational or representational theory of mind," according to which explicit and specific sentences about, say, Socrates, are neuronally inscribed in the brain.63 If this were true, there would be neither room nor need for Damasio's somatic markers. FROM MERE MOOD TO EXPLICIT CONSCIOUSNESS However, a word of caution is needed. These moods are not completely blank so that absolutely any verbal label whatever could be imposed and be adequate. A mood is, though indefinite, not absolutely and not completely so. It does have some prelinguistic meaning—or I should rather say that it has a prelinguistic "feel." It would make no sense to say that a verbal label about a mood is a hypothesis if the mood were so bland and blank that absolutely any hypothesis would do and that any hypothesis would be interchangeable with any other hypothesis. The fact that a mood is indefinite enough not to have a word attached to it does not imply that it has no quality at all. Though moods are silent, they can be classified very broadly as "being in a bad mood" or "being in a good mood." But "bad" and "good" are metaphors, not psychological terms. The basis for such broad classifications is to be found—even though at present our biochemistry still leaves a lot to be desired—in neuronal circuits and hormones. That is, in the amount of physical and chemical energy they provide. For this reason we should think of all classification of moods as a neurological enterprise which does not get us very far psychologically. The prelinguistic meaning is capable of being sensed, though not named. But since it is sensed, a label is only a hypothesis, which is to say that a label could be the wrong label. If it can be wrong, somebody

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might object, it ought to be, in principle, possible to state which label would be right. But this is not the case. We can weigh and entertain alternative hypotheses, but we can never say what label would cover it and be more than a hypothesis. Given the silence of neurons, we are face to face with a language problem. In English and in many other languages the word "conscious" is used transitively. We say we are conscious of something, and as soon as we use the word we immediately ask what we are conscious of. By contrast, when we say we are conscious in the nontransitive sense, all we mean is that we are not comatose. Our language disguises a neurological reality and tempts us to think that when we are conscious we are conscious of something. Most people would go so far as to say that when we are just conscious we are not really conscious at all. However, adherence to linguistic usage leads here to a neurological error. Our neurons are firing, and though we do not know exactly what circuits or reentries of firings cause us to be conscious in the sense of "not being comatose," we have no doubt that it is those neurons that are producing consciousness. But—and this is the heart of the matter— that is all. Neuronal circuits, no matter how they operate, are operating in silence. They do not carry words. They produce states of mind which are, no matter how obtrusive, inchoate, opaque, nontransparent, and undefined. At most we can call those states of mind "moods." But a mood is difficult to pinpoint. A mood has an undefinable aura, a quality we cannot be certain of, and the moment we try to locate it verbally it often evaporates or changes into something else. For this reason we must accept that our state of mind—the subject matter of psychology—though it exists, is as unverbal as nature and the cosmos itself. If we then try to hook words into that subject matter, we first of all are doing some violence to it; and, what is more, we are very likely to make mistakes even though the sobering conclusion is that there can be no telling whether and when a mistake has been made. If we give a verbal definition of a state of mind, we are making a hypothesis about it. In defining it verbally, we are transforming the mood into an emotion, or possibly into a perception. In doing so, we are creating a relationship between the undefined mood and the defined emotion which is wholly hypothetical. And since the undefined and undefinable mood escapes us, we have no way of testing whether the verbally defined emotion we have transformed it into is "really" related to the mood or not. This means we cannot ever find out whether the hypothesis we are making is correct or not. Consciousness defined becomes consciousness of something. The thing it is of does not belong to what the neurons have produced, but to what we have hypothetically imputed to them. The subject matter of

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psychology is silent or mute. When we talk about our states of mind— which is something all of us are doing all the time, and have to be doing all the time—we are really talking about something we have transformed the subject matter into. We exercise our reason in talking about that subject matter, our states of mind. But since what we are talking about is really the product of our language labels rather than our psyche itself and as it is in itself and by itself, we are here exercising a very impure kind of reason. We can now see that the transition from mood or somatic-marker-type awareness (linked to neuronal activity quite possibly in a causal way) to a conscious state of mind, is not a magical transformation of one substance into another or of a substance into something which is not a substance. For there is no transition. There are somatic markers on one side and there are hypothetical verbal interpretations of those markers on the other. A conscious state of mind is produced by the coming together of two different and independently operative neuronal systems. And, what is more, they come together hypothetically and, being hypothetical, such coming together can be varied, perhaps at will. Since the emotion (conscious experience) is verbally defined and verbally articulated and the awareness or mood is silent, though there is a gap it cannot and need not be bridged. The gap always remains, no matter how we turn, and is adequately described by the suggestion that the definition of the emotion is only and always only hypothetical. The articulated emotion is a hypothesis about the mood, no more and no less. This hypothesis about the awareness or mood cannot be tested. It must remain indeterminate and nondeterminable. For this reason, the relation between awareness and an articulated state of mind is in principle different from the most-probable causal relation which obtains between the physicochemistry of the neurons and the self-luminous awareness of the marker. I have called this awareness self-luminous because it is noticeable without being noticeable as this or that. Once the label is attached, we get a completely different ball game. Organisms which have brains large enough to form concepts and words and a larynx structured well enough to enunciate a lot of distinct and finely differentiated sounds command words and sentences. They can then proceed to describe or refer to the awareness they have in so many words. There is no dualism here: The attribution of words is done by the same organism which is aware. There is simply one organism wearing two different caps. The speech that utters the labels is due to neurons: memories of words and phrases, memory of rules according to which they are used, attention to neuronal "wriggles"64 of which we are aware (i.e., attention to occasions for uttering them, etc.). Consciousness arises from the com-

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ing together of neuronally produced speech and neuronally produced inchoate awareness. My main contention is that the coming together is a relationship which is not a causal one. The relationship is purely hypothetical and the coming together could take place in many different ways; that is, one and the same awareness can be labelled in many different ways: The two neuronal activities—the uttering of words and, say, the churning of the stomach—do not act in unison. Jerry Fodor has been confusing this issue by his repeated insistence that neurons are simply a script like the Greek alphabet. In one sense it is true that scripts encode something, but the difference is that the Greek alphabet encodes a preestablished meaning and the neuronal script does not. It only encodes chemical and physical information. THE INTERPRETATIVE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS Nevertheless, there is a snag. A statement such as "I am sad" clearly must be taken to refer to the awareness. But the awareness itself is nondescript and most certainly does not carry a label which says "sad." So the expression "I am sad" is an identification of the awareness, but not an identification which can be called a recognition, a portrait, or a description of the awareness. It identifies the awareness by a kind of ukase, for there is nothing or nothing much in the awareness to license this or any other particular identification. The awareness, though the chemistry and physics that produce it are identifiable, does not carry sufficient "aware" information to permit a one-to-one translation into words. The chemicophysical events merely generate inchoate awareness and leave it at that. The silent and nonspecific awareness probably contains enough information to allow us one day to link it to the chemistry biology, and physics of the neuronal circuits that cause it, so that we can relate high blood pressure or the churning of our stomach or a funny feeling in our solar plexus to specific neuronal events. But neither the neuronal events nor the visceral markers contain enough information to permit a recognition of the transit of that awareness to a full-blown, verbally specific state of mind. As an example, take a look at the physiological description of sexual arousal by Masters and Johnson and compare it with the way such sexual arousal was interpreted by Shakespeare when he wrote, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day." Shakespeare's conscious state, as expressed in that sonnet, provides information which is not derived from, let alone reducible to, the physiological process described by Masters and Johnson as a testicular elevation accomplished by a shortening of the spermatic cords. A vasocongestion leads to the flow of blood from branches of the internal pudendal arteries into the two corpora cavernosa and the corpus

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spongiosum which forms the erectile tissue of the penis.65 Shakespeare said more than such physiology of sexual arousal warranted. He added information, for there is nothing in the mere physiology of tumescence to justify his sonnet. Moreover, the same tumescence was interpreted very differently by Donne when he wrote, "Whoever loves and does not to himself propose the right, true end of love." And again, look at Dante's way of lifting tumescence into articulated consciousness by saying, "Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare la donna mia," or at Santa Teresa of Avila who, mutatis mutandis, interpreted her arousal as a mystical encounter with Jesus Christ. Bernini's famous sculpture of Santa Teresa combines her awareness of the somatic marker and her conscious interpretation of it in a very telling way Explicit emotional reactions are not uncluttered singular responses to somatic markers, for the same marker can trigger a variety of emotions. It is also well known that while we all have much the same nervous system, the definition of explicit emotions the somatic markers end up as varies widely from culture to culture. In fact, it has been argued that the very emergence of articulated emotions, distinct from mere moods about which nothing much can be said, requires a social matrix.66 Oliver Sacks reports that an elderly woman who had worked in a brothel in her youth described the way spirochetes were stimulating her ancient cerebral cortex by saying that she was feeling "frisky" and that she was suffering from "Cupid's Disease" and did not really wish to be cured because it was delightful to feel frisky again.67 Sacks did not add, as he should have, that if an elderly nun had come to him with similar spirochetes— possibly caught in her youth on the proverbial lavatory seat—she would not have told him she was feeling "frisky" and that she had "Cupid's Disease"; but, more likely, would have said that she was unhappy because she was possessed by the devil and that she hoped he might be able to cure her. We also ought to understand the discovery that our limbic system is inherited from early mammals in this way. It is alleged that it is that limbic system which gives rise to anger, desire, affection, ecstasy, and fear. In reality it does nothing of the sort. It merely generates somatic markers which we interpret as anger, desire, affection, ecstasy, and fear. Paul MacLean, the famous discoverer of our triune brain, should not have spoken of the cerebral evolution of emotion, but of the cerebral evolution of the somatic markers. The evolution of emotions, that is, the choice of the verbal interpretations of the somatic markers, is a cultural phenomenon. These examples can be summed up as an epigram: Conscious states of mind are not at all what people think; they are what people thinkl If we accept that it is the application of words which transforms the marker into a conscious state of mind, we must take another critical

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look at Wittgenstein's famous contention that states of mind are not objects of knowledge and that we cannot be wrong about them.68 When I am in pain, I know with certainty that I am in pain, he argued. There is no relation between a knower and a known. Daniel Dennett agrees and declared that he was merely trying to redo, in his Consciousness Explained, what Wittgenstein had done already69 But Wittgenstein was only half right. It is true that the marker which results from noticeable events in the nervous system is not an object of knowledge. Either one has it or one does not. It is simply there. But there is nothing in the marker which would justify, let alone dictate, the employment of the word "pain." The employment of that word as a label for that marker is one's choice. The Marquis de Sade, famously, might have chosen the word "pleasure" for the same marker. So, while it is true that we do not have here a cognitive problem which asks which word might be the correct word for this special marker, we also have, contrary to what Wittgenstein said, a complete lack of certainty. The choice of the word "pain" is a decision in favor of a hypothesis which is tentative and might very well be wrong, even though we could never say which other hypothesis would be right. Elizabeth Anscombe, in her Intention of 1957, had already come within an inch of getting to the right point.70 She argued that Wittgenstein had been "wrong" in claiming that we know what our intentions are and can, therefore, not be wrong about them. She argued that we can only say what our intentions are. She ought to have added that if we can only "say" what they are, we can also be very wrong in what we are saying. FOLK PSYCHOLOGY Again, if it is true that it is the application of words to the somatic markers and that in such applications we can never be sure to hit the right note, then it must follow that when we are doing psychology we are always condemned or confined to what we must call folk psychology. Folk psychology is a form of mind reading. It enables us to understand what we intend others to understand and, for that matter, what we intend ourselves to understand about ourselves.71 We all use folk psychology all the time, even the most untutored of us. We are simply doing so when we are saying we are unhappy or in love. It consists of the application of knowledge about states of mind to any situation whatever. When we are going to town, we say, "I want to go to town." When we love somebody, we say, "I love you," and so forth. But even here in this ordinary, everyday, and common or garden parlance about states of mind, there creep in doubts and wonders which ought to have alerted people to the fact that there might well be a hia-

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tus between a neuronal event's somatic marker and explicit words after all, and that the slapdash assumption is not as justified as we all like to suppose. Indeed, we like to suppose that it is because it makes us uneasy to accept that our very own states of mind could be other than what we think and, what is more, feel they are. "I think you are jealous," a lover says to his girlfriend. She does not necessarily reply, "Yes, I am," but, often enough, in quite ordinary folk psychology, she replies, "Perhaps I am," thus indicating by the use of "perhaps" that she is not all that certain. "You are very brave," somebody says to a patient in hospital. And the reply, as often as not, is not, "Yes I am," but, "Oh, not really!" which elicits a further reply by the first speaker, "7 think you are!" or "I think you are!" thus indicating that there is room for doubt. Either the first speaker means to say that other people may not think so, or that she is "thinking" so but may actually be mistaken. Or take the expression, "You are jealous, I shouldn't wonder." Here the speaker is adding in the same breath that he is actually wondering, even though he is implying that he is not really wondering, but might be thought to be wondering. Or again, "I love you!" brings forth, often enough, a corrective answer: "No, you are just infatuated." Or consider the well known phenomenon of masochism. Here it is not that a person is feeling explicit pain and, perversely, labels it as pleasure even while writhing in agony. In reality, he is feeling something fairly nondescript but labels it "pleasure," where another person could label the same feel, induced by the same electric wire touching his skin, "pain." There is no need to multiply examples. They all show that in folk psychology we are always or almost always aware of uncertainty and are supposing or wondering whether we are right or not. It is of the essence of folk psychology that it is tentative. And if we are not so wondering or supposing, we ought to be. Unfortunately, there are, these days, counsellors, psychotherapists, and professional psychologists around who do not heed this limitation inherent in folk psychology and who causally link anxiety to childhood seduction or pyromania to father deprivation as if there were evidence for the causal link. These same persons claim to have "expertise" in what ought to be no more than tentative guesses. Unlike those "experts," the script writers of the British TV soap opera "Coronation Street" know exactly how uncertain folk psychology is. In one episode, Deirdre bursts into tears when she learns that her kidneys are not suitable as a transplant for her daughter who needs one desperately She then asks herself whether she is crying because she cannot help her daughter or because she realizes that she is so selfish as to be actually relieved that she can keep both her kidneys. One of those experts might say to her that she ought to identify her "motive" and then name it accordingly. But, in reality, naming and

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identifying always come together. One cannot first identify and then name according to one's identification. It is the naming that identifies and if one is as uncertain about the naming as one ought to be, one must remain uncertain about all identification. Folk psychology is indeed a loosely knit network of largely tacit principles, platitudes, and paradigms.72 It is the psychology and the psychological reasoning employed by all people. Though ordinary, it is something we cannot do without. As it stands, it does "not have a single, unified, well-defined notion of content, but rather a set of vague notions flying in loose formation. This may be all very well for folk theory going about its humdrum business,... [in folk psychology] there is no such thing as the content of someone's propositional attitudes."73 The reason why it does not have a single unified theory and why its pronouncements are flying in loose and hypothetical formations is that there cannot be anything else. Because of this inherent messiness, ardent neurologists and psychologists hope that one day there will be a "pukka" theory about the mind and its workings, and then folk psychology will be seen to be the "stone-age relative of a more scientific theory" 74 The dream of a unified theory in which there is only talk of neurons is Utopian, because it neglects the peculiarly hypotheticointerpretative relation between mere awareness, which is mute, and conscious states of mind, which are eloquent. During recent years there has been an enormous leap into cognitive science and neuropsychology, a move designed to show that soon we will be able to do away with folk psychology and talk about what is really going on (i.e., neuronal events). Given the silence of neuronal events, these moves are condemned to failure, for given that silence and the mute nature of the markers, there can never be a one-to-one correspondence between neuronal events and their markers on the one hand and verbally labelled states of mind on the other. There can only be a one-to-one correspondence between the silent neuronal events and the equally mute buzzes they generate. But since we cannot put our finger on those buzzes, that one-to-one correspondence can never be ascertained. We can only put our finger on verbally defined buzzes, but the verbal definition removes the buzz, by transforming it into a full-fledged emotion, from the one-to-one correspondence with the neuronal events. We cannot identify the content of the buzz or the mood, as it is by itself, via a sentence. Edelman correctly calls the correlation between a brain state and a mental state degenerate because "many different brain states can lead to a single particular conscious state."75 The link between verbally labelled conscious states and brain states is indeterminate. It is so not just because we are at present ignorant, but because the nature of these states is such that their relationship to

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brain states is indeterminate, even though we know quite a lot both about neurons and about the role played by language. The entire project of neurophilosophy as conceived by Patricia Smith Churchland and of cognitive science as conceived by Stephen Stich is based on disregard for what we actually do know.76 We know that neuronal events do not come with words attached to them and that the moods they generate are nonspecific. On the basis of such knowledge, we are obliged to conclude that any direct reduction of verbally defined states of mind to neuronal circuitry is impossible. The impossibility of the pursuit of behaviorism, introspection, cognitive psychology, or any other project which depends on the functionally one-to-one correspondence between what the neurons generate and how we define our states of mind condemns us permanently to the pursuit of folk psychology; that is, to a verbal interpretation or to mere verbal, tentative hypotheses about the neuronally generated moods which, as they stand, cannot be deciphered unequivocally or labelled with precision. We need language to give them a local habitation and a name. I would argue that Donald Davidson is wrong in saying that "mental characteristics are . . . dependent or supervenient on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect."77 True, there is only one event: the neuronally induced somatic marker. Its verbal interpretation, which amounts to consciousness, imports information into it, but does not make it into a second event which differs in some mental respect from it. THE PROBLEM OF THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF THE OBJECTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS Take a case mentioned by Margaret Donaldson.78 A dog had misbehaved and had been put out. A child shouted, "Doggie-doggie out. Out doggie." The child had the right neuronal maps in her body and was aware that the dog had to be outside. But the child's language was inadequate and therefore it could only state a fact; that is, what was immediately the case, namely that the dog was outside. The child could not distinguish between the decision to put it out, the wish that the dog ought to be out, the fact that it was out, or the hope that it would soon be out. To be freed from the bondage to the immediate present, the child would have had to be linguistically more competent. Without an adequate language, the child could not avail itself of the neuronal maps its brain were providing and explore their full potential.

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Being neutral and opaque in themselves, the somatic markers or buzzes provided by the physics and chemistry of the brain have to wait upon language to determine, among other things, the ontological status of the states of mind they can be interpreted as. Such determination is, as has been argued, hypothetical, not causal. They can be variously labelled or referred to as wishes, hopes, or fears; memories of wishes, hopes, fears, impressions, or phantasies; or direct representations of events or phantasies, dreams, or memories of dreams. Once ontologically defined, it is a common experience to start doubting whether the ontological status which has been assigned to them is the correct one. This is specially the case with dreams, where often enough we cannot be sure whether we have dreamt something or have actually experienced it. The moods and buzzes are merely the raw material about which we hypothesize. In themselves they do not carry sufficient information to determine their ontological status. This situation in which memories and hopes, fears, and wishes can be interchangeably assigned to moods is charmingly and ingeniously exploited in Robbe-Grillet's novels, where the narrative consists of a string of flat events without any indication of whether the events are what the hero has experienced, has feared, has hoped, has dreamed about, or has wished to happen in the future. Let me dwell for a moment on the way in which the assignation of an ontological status to a mood influences our understanding of states of mind. It is a common belief that it is the ascription of "wishing" or "hoping" or "believing" or "being certain that" or the like which raises a neuronal event to the level of consciousness and that the neuronal event itself comes ready made with a label. Thus, "being sad" is not all that conscious, but "I think I am sad" is. All this is incorrect. The neuronal event, no matter how loud the buzzing we are aware of, comes without label. It is the labelling that creates proper consciousness of this or that, but that label does not come from the neurons that produce the buzzing. The addition of "wishing" or "hoping" merely provides further occasion for getting it wrong. For now we can not only be wrong in identifying the original, neuronally generated buzz as a feel of "sadness," but also in claiming that we "wish to be" or "remember to have been" sad. The second-order level, far from being the cause of consciousness, is merely an increased opportunity for error and uncertainty. The buzzes or moods underdetermine any one possible verbal construction. There can always be others. And by the same token, any one construction overdetermines any one mood which can be referred to by a large number of possible constructions. The mutual indeterminacy of both moods and verbally defined states of mind is well illustrated by the phenomenon of algolagnia and by the phenomenon

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reported by Freud's A Child Is Being Beaten.79 In algolagnia, pleasurable sexual excitations are mixed with the occurrence of terrifying events. There is no telling whether the mixing is accidental or contrived, and the terrifying events may be of very different kinds. They may involve the deaths of people or animals or merely the threat of death. They can involve the destruction of property or of health or a total annihilation of material goods. The destructive act may be performed imaginatively or really, either by the person himself or herself or by somebody else. The person suffering from algolagnia may have those acts performed by somebody else or merely imagine them to be so performed or that person may induce somebody else to perform them and he or she may remain a mere spectator. They may be willed by God or the devil. In Freud's story there is the image that a child is being whipped on its bottom, but there is no corresponding information as to whether this image produces sadistic pleasure or moral indignation or a feeling of power in thinking that a child is about to be beaten or a feeling of excited anticipation at the thought that a child is about to be beaten. The image is unspecified and sufficiently inchoate to allow for a large number of quite contrary (verbal) interpretations to be put on it. All of which proves again and again that there cannot be a one-toone correspondence between a neuronal buzz we are aware of and a verbally constructed label hypothetically attached to it. It is an error to think that there is one single construction which is right and of which any other construction is a mere symbol, or that any one construction constitutes sanity because it is "realistic" and that all other constructions are lapses into mental illness. If it is possible to find a criterion for distinguishing sanity from insanity, it cannot depend on a "true" construction of a mood. Every such construction is made up of two totally different kinds of events, both neuronal. On one side there are the neuronally induced stirrings of inchoate awareness and, on the other, there are the verbally articulate labels more or less arbitrarily but always hypothetically attributed to them. The neuronal stirrings we are aware of and the labels we construct linguistically do not tally or fit one another in a one-toone correspondence. Nor is there, in principle and by the nature of the case, any way in which they can be made to tally or thought to be made to tally. Ironically, this absence of a tally suggests a possible way in which we might understand the old problem of the relation between mind and body or, in our terms, the relation between neural physics and chemistry and verbally formulated states of mind. According to the lack of a tally, the mind can influence the body but not the other way round. The relationship is not symmetrical for an obvious reason. Neu-

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rons do not contain enough information to shape the verbal labels we assign to the moods they produce. On the other hand, verbal labels contain a surfeit of information and can put the neuronally generated moods into a variety of shapes so that, in the end, this kind of feedback makes us even cease to be aware of those parts of the moods which do not come under the chosen label. The possibilities for shaping and even altering existing moods are thus very large, if not endless. The process of such shaping can start with words. True, they do not cause the moods, but give them shape. One can, for example, "talk" oneself into a state by putting together a description of anxiety. This description will shape the buzzings that are present and then reinforce them, make them specific, and identify them in the direction which will fit the anxiety one has manufactured verbally Sweat will then break out and heartbeat will increase. By much talking in this way one will get anxious cramps and hysterical symptoms. Conversely, one can talk oneself into a state of tranquillity, as is witnessed by countless meditational exercises prescribed in almost all religious cultures. Thus, the mind can influence the body—not, as is commonly supposed, because it can exercise causal power, but because, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no causal power. It is often alleged that the reason why a reduction of psychology to neurology cannot ever work is that there is an irremediably mental element involved in such states of mind as acts of believing, wishing, hoping, doubting, intending, and so forth. This is an error. There is nothing specially "mental" in these adverbial ascriptions to a state of mind. Since a labelled state of mind cannot be reduced to the mood or buzz it articulates, a verbally defined state of mind has the appearance of floating in the air. It appears as something vaguely spiritual or purely mental. This is not because it is a separate substance, but because of its unattached nature. Any one given state of mind does not correspond to the neuronal buzz about which it is a hypothesis. It therefore creates the impression that it is mental or that it is purely in the mind. And in a sense it is. But the fact that it is does not prove that it is a mental substance. It merely underlines the fact that as a defined event it is different from the opaque and undefined neuronal wriggle which is its substratum. This irreducibility makes us think that, quite literally, the subject matter of psychology is the psyche, a set of events which are not material in the sense in which neuronal events are and in which the words about it—heard, spoken, or written—are. The real reason why the reduction cannot work is that a verbally specified and articulated state of mind contains more information than the neuronally generated inchoate awareness it purports to specify. The

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neuronal events on the other side do not yield enough articulated information to allow us to identify them with a verbally described state of mind, except in a purely tentative and hypothetical way. We can represent the relationships between initial stimulus and final conscious state of mind in the following way W > N - > SM < L where W stands for the world or the initial stimulus, N for the neuronal circuitry, SM for the somatic marker or Newton's phantasm, and L for the linguistic label which transforms the marker or phantasm into consciousness. At first, from W to N some information is lost because the nervous system is selective. Then comes the buzz in the shape of the marker and, finally, the state of consciousness which, through the advent of language, contains a great deal more information than is available in N and SM so that the last relationship is purely hypothetical and merely interpretative. This amounts to saying that whatever it is one avows about one's somatic markers is not causally determined by the somatic markers. First, some information is lost because the neurons are selective. Then information is added. But there is no functional equivalence between what is lost and what is added. And if one were to confront the information contained in L with the W—as a thought experiment, for there is no way to know what kind of information the W actually contains—one is left with the conclusion that the state of mind contains both more and less information than the world and that there is no predictable relationship between the two. Once more, this conclusion is diametrically opposed to the contentions of so called cognitive science, which, in the best Aristotelian tradition of empiricism, envisages an unbroken causal chain from initial stimulus to a verbally defined state of conscious mind, complete with an ontologically specific indicator which says whether one believes, thinks, hopes, fears, remembers, or the like, whatever the initial stimulus has made one conscious of. In this view, the neuronal circuits do no more than mediate between initial stimulus and final tentative consciousness.80 It is Freud's undying merit that, although he did not recognize the purely hypothetical nature of the relationship, he did not try his hand at such reduction but tried instead to make folk psychology more scientific and less tortuous and tentative by showing how folk-psychological states of mind are determined by folk-psychological causes.81 The enterprise, as we shall see, was quixotic, and the stories of his life by Ernest Jones, Ronald Clark, and Peter Gay would have made better reading and more sense had they been written in picaresque style.

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NOTES 1. Charles Sanders Peirce, quoted by L. Menand, "AnAmerican Prodigy," New York Review of Books, 2 December 1993, p. 32, col. 4. 2. "Frege bypasses human cognition as irrelevant to objective meaning relations," M. Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xxxi. 3. Stephen Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). 4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (London: Fontana, 1974), 111. 5. Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure (London: Macmillan, 1988), 56. 6. Jaak Panksepp, "Towards a General Psychobiological Theory of the Emotions," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (1982): 435. 7. Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 455. For criticisms of Patricia Churchland's easy belief that verbal expressions and neuronal events come hand in hand see Raymond Tallis, The Explicit Animal (London: Macmillan, 1991), 62-63. 8. Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal Man, trans. L. Garey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 109. 9. R. A. Wise, "The Dopamine Synapse and the Notion of Pleasure Centres in the Brain," Trends in Neuroscience 3 (1980): 91-95. 10. W. V. O. Quine, The Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1. 11. Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 103,109. 12. Kim Sterelny, The Representational Theory of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), x. 13. Colin McGinn, "Review of Neurophilosophy," by Patricia Smith Churchland, Times Literary Supplement, 6 February 1987,131. 14. It was one of Frege's cardinal errors, repeated uncritically by M. Dummett, Urspriinge der analytischen Philosophic (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 128 (German translation of his Bologna lectures of 1987), to hold that our knowledge of "inner" objects is mediated through thoughts about them, just as our knowledge of external objects is mediated through thoughts about them. In reality, those "inner" objects, so called, are not objects at all. They are prelinguistic, undefined, and, hence, opaque feels and mere somatic markers or visceral stirrings. 15. Paul Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 176. 16. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 71ff. 17. See, for example, D. Bray, Cell Movements (New York: Garland, 1992). 18. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1994), 134-135. 19. Quoted by R. Snell, "The Folly of Allegory and Interpretation," Times Literary Supplement, 18 April 1997, p. 17, col. 2. 20. R. Kirk, Raw Feelings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

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21. Galen Strawson, Mental Reality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). 22. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 120-121. 23. Nicholas K. Humphrey, "The Social Function of the Intellect," in Growing Points in Ethology, ed. P. P. G. Bateson and R. A. Hinde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 24. Peter Munz, "The Evolution of Consciousness," Journal of Evolutionary and Social Systems 20 (1998): 317. 25. See I. Stewart and J. Cohen, Figments of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 206. 26. J. R. Searle, "Letter to the Editor," New York Review of Books, 14 June 1990, p. 58, col. 4. 27. S. Schachter, The Psychology of Affiliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 126-127. 28. F. Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 43. 29. J. R. Searle, "Minds and Brains without Programs," in Mindwaves, ed. C. Blakemore and Susan Greenfield (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 226. Searle is guilty of precisely this confusion. 30. Isaac Newton, "A Letter from Mr. Isaac Newton... containing his New Theory about Light and Colors," The Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions, 19 February 1671/2, p. 3085. 31. John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding 2 (30): 15. 32. See D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 389ff.; Chalmers, Conscious Mind, 263ff. 33. Friedrich Schiller, Samtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Der Tempel Verlag), 264; my translation. 34. William James, Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 245. 35. Damasio, Descartes' Error, 173ff. 36. Ibid., 146-147. 37. J. R. Searle, "Consciousness and the Philosophers," New York Review of Books, 6 March 1997, p. 46, col. 1. 38. Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 39. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994). 40. Paul Churchland, The Engine of Reason, 223-224. 41. Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism (New York: Basic Books, 1987). Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). 42. Raymond Tallis, The Explicit Animal (London: Macmillan, 1991). 43. Chalmers, Conscious Mind. 44. This is very similar to an earlier argument in R. Jackendoff, Consciousness and the Computational Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 23-24, who considers conscious awareness as an externalization or projection of some subset of elements of the computational mind, so that computations cause and determine what we are conscious of. 45. For other examples, see H. Plotkin, Darwin Machines (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 208, where it is alleged that the six emo-

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tional states (i.e., not the somatic markers but verbally defined emotion!) are postcards from our genes; or Ruth Millikan, "Explanation in Biopsychology," in Mental Causation, ed. J. Heil and A. Mele (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 124, where it is alleged that the "biological functions of [an] individual's concepts forming systems . . . translate into categories." 46. S. Pinker, The Language Instinct (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 77. 47. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind (London: Paladin Books, 1985), 267. 48. See Raymond Tallis, Explicit Animal, 84, 94, for a good statement that neuronal circuits are and always remain physicochemical and that there is no direct exit from the physics and chemistry to a verbally defined consciousness. For the realization that one always goes from the physics and chemistry of neurons to more physics and chemistry, see also W. H. Calvin, The Cerebral Symphony (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 200. See also E. Harth, The Creative Loop (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 47-48. 49. W. N. Morris, Mood: The Frame of Mind (New York: Springer, 1989), 1-2,17. 50. C. A. Ruckmick, The Psychology of Feeling and Emotion (New York: McGraw, 1936), 72. 51. Niko H. Frijda, "Moods, Emotion Episodes, and Emotion," in Handbook of Emotions, ed. M. Lewis and Jeanette M. Havilland (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 381. 52. Niko H. Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 335ff. 53. J. R. Searle, Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992), 140. 54. Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 176. 55. Jaak Panksepp, "Neurochemical Control of Moods and Emotions: Amino Acids to Neuropeptides," in Handbook of Emotions, ed. M. Lewis and J. M. Havilland (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 87. 56. Ibid., 100. 57. R. B. Zajonc and D. N. Mclntosh, "Emotions Research," Psychological Science 3 (1992): 73. 58. J. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 268. 59. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949). Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). 60. William Cowper, quoted by Charles Rosen, "The Mad Poets," New York Review of Books, 22 October 1992, p. 33, col. 4. J. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 65, recognizes that identification is not easy, but greatly oversimplifies the problem by saying that the person in whom the emotion is occurring is less likely to get it right than an outside observer. The real problem is that the brain does not produce emotions but somatic markers which somebody labels as this or that emotion. The attribution of such labels is an unverifiable as well as an unf alsifiable hypothesis about a somatic marker, because the latter does not carry the sort of information which would allow one to test the hypothetical label. 61. Quoted in A. Alvarez, "Let Me Sleep on It," Times Literary Supplement, 23 December 1994, p. 13, col. 4. 62. A. Alvarez, Night (London: Cape, 1995), 72.

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63. For this tenet and its fundamental importance for cognitive science, see Pinker, Language Instinct, 77-78. 64. A term borrowed from Humphrey, History of the Mind, 186. 65. W. H. Masters and V. E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 177, 206. 66. T. D. Kemper, "Sociological Models in the Explanation of Emotions," in Handbook of Emotions, ed. M. Lewis and J. M. Havilland (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). See P. Ekman, "Biological and Cultural Contributions to Body and Facial Movement in the Expression of Emotions," in Explaining Emotions, ed. A. Rorty (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980) and R. C. Solomon, "Getting Angry," in Culture Theory, ed. R. A. Schweder and R. A. LeVine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 244. 67. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London: Picador, 1986), 97. 68. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 408. 69. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 462. 70. Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957). 71. See S. Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 25,27. 72. See, for example, Steven P. Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). 73. Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 382-383. 74. R A. Sharpe, "The Very Idea of Folk Psychology," Inquiry 30 (1987): 381. 75. Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 260. 76. Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. 77. Donald Davidson, "Mental Events," in Experience and Theory, ed. L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (London: Duckworth, 1988), 88. 78. Margaret Donaldson, Human Minds (London: Allen Lane, 1992), 108. 79. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1963) 17: 179-204 (hereafter cited as S.E.). 80. See, for example, Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 79. Fodor wrongly presumes that there is an unfailing isomorphism between these states. For his latest attempt to reconcile the computer model of thinking with "externalism" see Jerry Fodor, The Elm and the Expert (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 81. See especially Freud, S.E., 15: 21.

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2 The Manufacture of Eloquence

The neurons themselves preserve their strong deafening silence. The moods produced by the silent circuitries remain inchoate and so ambiguous that they too are all but silent. Nevertheless, we have to turn those silent moods into verbally articulated emotions in order to orient ourselves and to communicate with other people. We have to find out where we are, who we are, and what we want; and we have to calculate what other people are likely to want or do, so that we can adjust our wants to their wants, be it in a hostile or in a friendly manner. We can only do so by transforming those silent moods and somatic markers into conscious states of mind. In short, how do we break the silence of the neurons? If the neuronally produced somatic markers are so ambiguous that they not only stand in need of labelling and definition but also provide no clear guide as to what verbal labels one is to chose, we must next ask ourselves what the minimum conditions for producing a verbal definition are. This is a formidable problem, because the verbally defined state of mind we are conscious of does not correspond to the neuronally produced mood. It is, on the contrary, a hybrid of mood and words. We know where the mood comes from. We now have to ask ourselves where the words come from. They obviously are not glued to the moods. But what is their source? How is eloquence manufactured? A verbally produced state of mind does not correspond to the mood; it merely has to be more or less compatible with it. We therefore cannot hope to get much of a clue as to where the verbal labels come

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from by the mood itself. The mood by itself does not contain enough information to yield an explicitly defined state of mind and act as a guide for the finding of words. Before an answer to the question of how eloquence is manufactured can be attempted, it is necessary to state categorically that there can be no suggestion that words come from the outside or are a gift from heaven. Speech, like everything else the organism does, is produced by neurons which activate the larynx, breathing, tongue, and whatever else is required for vocalization. The meaning of the sounds emitted and the grammar of the strings of sounds formed stem again from specific parts of the brain. The point, however, is that the well-known speech centers of the brain are not identical with the neuronal circuits which generate the moods that have to be identified. The two sets of neurons, on the contrary, are not only different spatially, but also do not usually work in tandem. Therefore, though speech (which is essential for human eloquence and for the consciousness it produces) comes from neuronal events, it does not automatically stand in a oneto-one correspondence with the moods which come from other neurons and which speech endeavors to identify and interpret. I do not think that a universal answer to the question of how words for such interpretations are to be found is possible. All one can do is to produce examples of how people have dealt with it. If one examines how people interpret their moods, how they interpret other people's moods, and how other people interpret their moods, one will gain insight into the sources people draw upon to give shape to their moods. Obviously, such an inquiry is best served by an examination of the most finished product available; that is, literature. And it is to literature that I will therefore turn. If justification is needed for a recourse to this kind of evidence, it is, as I said, that literature is the most finished product available; at least, more finished than introspective discourse or colloquially generated surveys. But there is more to it than that. The modern novel originated in the eighteenth century and, as Ian Watt once observed, it arose at a time when there were enough people around, sufficiently close together to satisfy two conditions.1 They had to be sufficiently apart to make them wonder how others felt and thought, and yet sufficiently close together to be able to plausibly apply their own surmises and inferences to other people. To gain insight into how eloquence is manufactured and constructed, one does not need to survey the entire field. I will, instead, pick out a few salient examples. I will begin with two extremes, Rousseau and James Joyce, who tried what is seemingly impossible, a verbal portrait of the somatic markers. At the other end of the scale there are two writers, Jane Austen and Stendhal, who explicitly manufactured eloquence by relying, as the

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silence of the neurons would compel them to do, on external benchmarks. They take their guidelines from the outside, not from looking at the somatic markers. In the middle there stands Henry James, a selfconscious master fumbler who keeps struggling to manufacture eloquence but is very alive to the dubious quality of such eloquence because he keeps at least one eye on the somatic markers such eloquence cannot possibly correspond to. Finally, we come to Freud, a self-confessed and dedicated psychologist who thought he could get to the bottom of the somatic markers by stripping away the pretense and telling us what all the others had been or were disguising; that is, how consciousness ought to be manufactured so that it would really correspond to the neuronally produced moods. With Freud we go outside the sphere of the novel, but the inclusion of his writings is not arbitrary. Freud claimed to be a psychologist, and if psychology is to be a body of knowledge about somatic markers, there has to be a claim that there is at least one way to manufacture eloquent consciousness which is not a matter of choice. In our scheme of things, admittedly, such psychology cannot correspond to the neuronal productions. But we ought to consider its claim that its eloquently manufactured interpretations of these neuronal productions are not arbitrary Rousseau, Joyce, and James endeavored to report the opaque moods as best as one can. Jane Austen, Stendhal, and Freud had recourse to preconceptions—very different preconceptions in all cases, as I will show—to give body and status to the words they glued to the moods. But all of them wrestled with the problem of the manufacture of eloquence, which is, basically, the problem of how to transform unworded and inherently unwordable neuronal events into mentionable and, if mentionable, discrete states of mind. To prepare the ground, consider a telling description of the way in which the moods and somatic markers we are aware of are disconnected from the eloquence we engage in, day in and day out. The passage comes from Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, and is in all probability autobiographical.2 Katherine Hilbery, surrounded by the members of her vociferously eloquent family, is looking out of a window through darkness to the river: With her eyes upon the dark sky, voices reached her from the room in which she was standing. She heard them as if they came from people in another world, a world antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude, the antechamber to reality; it was as if, lately dead, she heard the living talking. The dream nature of our life had never been more apparent to her, never had life been more certainly an affair of four walls, whose objects existed only within the range of lights and fires, beyond which lay nothing, or nothing more than darkness.

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Here, lest one supposes that this passage is all m a d e u p poetry designed to impress the reader, is a passage from Virginia Woolf's diary which led her to write h o w Katherine Hilbery's somatic markers are disconnected from manufactured eloquence: When I come indoors, it is all so silent—I am not carrying a great rush of wheels in my head—yet I am writing—oh & we are very successful—& there is—what I must love—change ahead. . . . And it is autumn; & the lights are going up; & Nessa is in Fitzroy Street—in a great misty room, with flaring gas & unsorted plates & glasses on the floor—& the Press is booming—& this celebrity, business is quite chronic—& I am richer than I have ever been—& bought a pair of earrings today—& for all this, there is vacancy & silence somewhere in the machine.3 Let me begin with some striking examples of writers w h o have m a d e the heroic effort to turn the silences of the neurons—mere mute moods— into eloquence with an absolute m i n i m u m of outside help. That is, they tried to represent the silence as it is in itself by making w o r d s reflect something and represent the mood as much as possible as it is in itself. Even here some scaffolding w a s necessary, for silence remains silent unless one interferes. I will start with Rousseau. The closest Rousseau came to representing the silence of the neurons was in a passage from his last work, Reveries du promeneur solitaire: Night was falling. I perceived the sky, a few stars and a little verdure. That first sensation was a delicious moment. It was still only through it that I could feel myself. In that moment I was born to life and it seemed to me that I filled with my whole slight existence all the objects I perceived. Wholly in the present moment, I remembered nothing; I had no distinct notion of my individuality, not the least idea of what had just happened to me; I did not know who I was or where I was; I felt neither hurt, nor fear, nor anxiety. I saw my blood flowing as I would have seen a brook flowing without even dreaming that this blood belonged to me in an any way. I felt in all my being a delightful calm with which, every time I recall it, I can find nothing comparable in all the activity of known pleasures.4 H o w did Rousseau enable himself to represent the silence of the neurons? Admittedly, the representation was done in words and therefore not itself silent. But the eloquence employed speaks eloquently of silence. The best answer available is to be found in one of Rousseau's earliest experiences, reported in the Confessions. As a child, he spent a long time with foster parents. One day he was doing his h o m e w o r k in a room adjoining the kitchen. Some combs h a d been p u t to dry on the hearth and w h e n the servant returned one of them was found to have been broken. Everybody in the house concluded that Jean-Jacques must

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have broken it. "I denied it stubbornly, but the evidence was too conclusive and weighed more heavily than all my protestations." Despite his protestations of innocence, he was given a spanking. "I discovered, in the very pain and shame of punishment, an admixture of sensuality which made me desirous, rather than fearful, of having it repeated once again by the same hand." 5 In this experience he discovered a type which he was to use time and again and which became the template or mold in which he cast his subsequent thoughts. On one side there was the dictate of reason with its undeniable cogency. The comb had been broken and there had been nobody else around who could have done it. On the other, there was his sincere inner conviction that he had not been responsible for the damage. Rational evidence versus inner, but implausible, certainty. Goodness was on the side of the inner sense; civilization, the arts, and the sciences were on the side of reason which, despite its obvious cogency, was misleading. This opposition became the model for his views on the lack of benefit to be derived from the arts and sciences, on the viciousness of inequality and civilization and was used as the guiding idea in his great novel, La nouvelle Heloise. This novel was originally conceived along the lines of a typical Tristan and Isolde story and was intended to end in a tragic death which would have dissolved the passion as one ultimate pre-Wagnerian consummation in which the two lovers were to be drowned in a boat during a storm.6 He dismissed the conventional ending because he wanted the novel to have less to do with romantic passion than with the devotion to the state of nature (i.e., of the innocence of the inner voice, with the beauty of natural sentiment uncorrupted by civilization). He changed the ending and let Julie die in an attempt to save her son; that is, in the performance of her natural duty as a mother. Julie was to be a noble creature, prompted by sentiment. In this way, Rousseau's childhood experience with the combs prefigured the story of Julie, or the death of Julie was an antitype of the childhood experience. Guehenno's biography of Rousseau stands out among countless Rousseau biographies because it is based on a recognition of the typological connections in Rousseau's life and thought.7 Guehenno starts by asking himself whether there is a point in writing a biography of a man who was so articulately autobiographical in his own writings. There is little point, he says, in pretending to "know better," but he succeeded in contributing something new to our knowledge of Rousseau by exhibiting the typology of Rousseau's life and thought. Rousseau's eloquent description of the silence of his neurons in the Reveries is the final antitype of his initial realization that the rationally ineffable and implausible inner conviction of innocence is superior to

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rational argument, evidence, and cogency. But the eloquence is manufactured in a way that is supposed to defeat eloquence and represent the silence: night is falling, past and present and future are absent. There is no memory, no knowledge of who he is, no fear, no anxiety, nothing but a delightful calm. This is as uninterpreted, neuronally generated a mood as anybody is capable of "describing." The description is modelled on the childhood experience and, insofar as the eloquence is manufactured and not simply derived from the observation of the inchoate mood, it is manufactured in the image and with the help of that childhood experience. Without it, the silence would have remained well and truly and literally silent. Rousseau, with the help of his early childhood experience, had developed a technique of representing the silence of the mood. Let me now turn to Henry James, who succeeded, head on, to represent the ambiguity of the neuronally produced silence of the moods before they become emotions. The use of the expression "head on" in connection with Henry James may seem, at first sight, a contradiction in terms. It was the genius of his literary style to avoid all head-on confrontation with anything. But this is just the point. If one is dealing with ambiguity, it is legitimate and correct to speak of "head on" when one manages to be completely ambiguous. Henry James's brother William completely missed the point when he complained, in a famous letter to his brother, about the "interminable elaboration of suggestive reference [and] the breathing and sighing round and round [to make up] the illusion of a solid object." He added, "Why don't you sit down and write a new book, with no twilight mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style?"8 It is ironic that this critical complaint should come from the man who had written about the stream of consciousness and who had argued in his Principles of Psychology that that stream is indeed all but silent because it does not consist of "pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful and other moulded forms of water.... It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Namelessness is compatible with existence There are innumerable consciousnesses of want, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other. Such a feeling of want is toto coelo other than a want of feeling: it is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it."9 Henry James addressed precisely the task of representing this ambiguity to produce words which would make up for the absence of that sound. It is a mystery that William failed to see that Henry was doing precisely what William accused psychologists of not doing!

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The novel in which this can be illustrated most readily is The Wings of the Dove. This novel is specially apt to bring out James's masterful grasp of the ultimateness of ambiguity, because in the brief misguided moment when he aspired to become a playwright, he used the plot of that novel to make it into a stage play It was a signal failure. Producing Densher and Kate and Milly on the stage, he demoted that splendid novel to the level of a whodunit. The play shows us a coarse plot of a scheming Densher to appropriate to himself and his betrothed the fortune of a dying heiress by pretending that he was in love with her. The novel is totally different. It is not a mean plot to defraud and deceive, but a virtuoso display of ambiguous feelings, even though in the end Milly dies and Densher gets the money. The mastery of ambiguity lies precisely in the fact that there is no conspiracy and that everyone of the major characters in the novel is uncertain about his or her feelings and doubly uncertain as to the effects those feelings have on others, especially on Milly, the heiress. "I shan't have to lie to her," says Densher. "It will be left all to me?" asked Kate. "All to you!... But it was, oddly, the very next moment as if he had perhaps been a shade too candid. His discrimination seemed to mark a possible, a natural reality, a reality not wholly disallowed by the account the girl had just given of her own intentions. There was a difference in the air—even if none other than the supposedly usual difference in truth between man and woman; and it was almost as if the sense of this provoked her."10 The impression of certainty conveyed by the "all to you," is immediately dispelled, not just qualified, by the realization that he had been a "shade too candid." Then there is a "possible" reality, and then the "possible" is immediately denied by the addition of "natural," which in ordinary discourse would be denial. If it is natural, it is more than possible. And then, further, the difference is only "supposedly." If Kate is provoked, she is so only "almost," and then only by "the sense of this," not by the actual meaning. Or take a different passage: She couldn't have said what it was in the conditions, that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as if before something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing, verily, but the perfection of the charm—or nothing, rather, but their excluded, disinherited state in the presence of it. The charm turned on them a face that was cold in its beauty, that was full of poetry never to be theirs, that spoke, with an ironic smile, of a possible but forbidden life ... and the idea became an image of never going down, of remaining aloft in the divine, dustless air, where she would hear but the splash of the water against the stone.11

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It is impossible to say with any unequivocal precision what precisely is going on in these two minds. And this is, precisely, what Henry James wants us to realize. It is as if this passage had been written in order to illustrate those famous pages from his brother's Principles of Psychology. One last example: In rejecting Lord Mark, Milly was to wonder afterwards if she had not been, at this juncture, on the point of saying something emphatic and vulgar—"Well, I don't at all events wantyou\" What somehow happened, however, the pity of it being greater than the irritation—the sadness, to her vivid sense, of his being so painfully astray, wandering in a desert in which there was nothing to nourish him—was that his error amounted to positive wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of usefulness for him that her having suffered him to insist almost convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped him off with her first impression of its purpose? She could do so now only by the allusion she had been wishing to make.12 Since the next examples, of a different kind of manufacture of eloquence, will be taken from Jane Austen, I would briefly suggest here a comparison with Anne's rejection of Mr. Eliot in Persuasion and with Emma's rejection of Mr. Elton in Emma. Jane Austen's heroines know with certainty what they are doing and are not impelled to tergiversate their own motives and speculate on how the men might feel in the face of the women's own convoluted ambiguities. But this is because Jane Austen does not aim to represent the ambiguous silence of the neurons. She has a very ready interpretation of the meaning of that silence to hand. Returning to Henry James, we can see that the very plot of The Wings of the Dove is conceived to convey ambiguity, especially in the character of Densher. If there is a plot to get hold of the heiress's money, it becomes derailed by the ambiguity of Densher's conscience and Milly's goodness. Though she discovers the "plot," she leaves her money to him; and Densher, though he did not even have to marry Milly and wait for her to die, refuses the money and also refuses to marry Kate whom he could now have married with even greater impunity than had been "foreseen" in the conspiracy. James's eloquent portrayal of the pre-interpreted ambiguity of silent moods was made possible, one might speculate, by his way of contrasting his "thinly composed" American society with the density of European society13 In America, people were straight and honest and called a spade a spade. In Europe, people were almost dishonest, because they realized that not even a spade ought to be called a spade. In his early Roderick Hudson, this theme is charmingly if somehow bluntly dealt with. It is only in The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and,

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eventually, in The Golden Bowl that he interiorizes this contrast. In The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors, where the American heroes, though vulnerably sensitive to the convolutions of European society and mind, remain the innocent Americans, the contrast remains but is interiorized. And in The Portrait of a Lady even the American heroine loses her straight innocence and becomes Europeanized, a bundle of ambiguities which make her decision to return to her darkly awful husband in Italy well nigh incomprehensible. His progress, we might conclude, was from a sociological experience to a psychological depth. Let me now turn to my last example, James Joyce, who tried to push the experiment of manufacturing eloquence about silence beyond reasonable limits. Joyce decided to take the bull by the horns and portray the inner silent and ambiguous subjectivity generated by our neurons as it is in itself. Unlike Rousseau, who had been concerned with the silence, and unlike Henry James, who had been concerned with the ambiguities, Joyce decided to write an interior monologue which he thought would portray that silent, ambiguous subjectivity as it stood. This was his project in Ulysses, which is written on the slapdash and, in Joyce's case, not so innocent assumption that words are glued to the episodes of the inner stream of consciousness and that, therefore, an interior monologue would amount to a portrayal of that silent subjectivity. He did not realize or admit to himself at this early stage that such a monologue is already one's own interpretation, be it Molly's or Bloom's, of that silent subjectivity. In his second major work, Finnegans Wake, Joyce decided to go one better and dispense with the slapdash assumption that subjectivity comes ready made with words glued to it. He decided to invent a private language. I am using the term "private language" in the sense in which it was used by Wittgenstein in his later philosophy Like no other philosopher before him, Wittgenstein had cut the Gordian knot and demonstrated that there is no way which might lead from subjective awareness to the public performance of speech. All earlier philosophers had tacitly assumed that the slapdash assumption is correct and that our use of language is governed by what we have in mind. Wittgenstein argued boldly that it is governed by conventional rules and not by subjective mental intentions. A purely private language, therefore, is impossible, and what goes on in our consciousness must forever remain "unsayable." In defiance of Wittgenstein, Joyce, like a Wagnerian Siegfried out to slay the dragon of ignorance, set out to create such a private language. Or better, if we keep to chronology, he set out to prove Wittgenstein wrong before Wittgenstein had actually spoken. Joyce realized that the only way to create such a private language was to reproduce the poliguity (Vieldeutigkeit in German) and incho-

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ateness of moods literally; that is, to create a language which, unlike all other languages, was semantically as polyguous as the somatic markers themselves. He proceeded systematically. He first wrote a draft of Finnegans Wake, and then systematically decomposed the first draft in order to introduce ambiguities. He then destroyed the second draft and made a third, even more ambiguous draft, and so on until he had rendered every word and the phrases it formed more and more polymorphous and polyguous by allowing himself to be guided by the contiguity of sound and the contingencies of meanings rather than by the logical necessity that is reflected in conventional grammar and semantics. Instead, he discovered the puns unavoidably inherent in ordinary speech acts (e.g., "when they were yung and easily freudened"). By these methods he destroyed the surface meanings of the first draft he had written and transformed it into a narrative which disguised both the original intention of its author and the public understanding any reader might have got from it. Joyce moved with studied purpose in the opposite direction of all cognitive processes which consist in removing double entendre, polyguity, and even mere ambiguity. For the aim of speakers and writers is to make texts more, not less precise. Joyce scholars and critics have spent endless labor trying to undo this process and to discover the "hidden" meanings, forgetting that Joyce had a purpose in hiding them. These scholars would be better employed if they spent their time in seeking to expand the ambiguities and puns of his text, rather than to diminish them (e.g., by enriching the sentence about the "yung" by amplifying the conventional "easily" into "squeezily"). There are two things to be said about this seemingly absurd effort to say the unsayable. First of all, one must notice that Joyce did not succeed. Insofar as the text of Finnegans Wake is at all intelligible, and even allowing for the fact that it is not supposed to be conventionally intelligible, it is an interpretation of the subjective and silent mood but not a direct representation of silence. The polyguities that are possible by Joycean language manipulation are limited; the polyguities inherent in the silence of the neuronally induced moods are not, or hardly not. But failure or not, it is interesting to watch where Joyce got the idea from. Joyce meant to create a myth for modern times, and originally fastened on the story of Ulysses. This was easier said than done, even though T. S. Eliot, writing in 1923, persuaded himself that Joyce, in using the myth, would be able to "manipulate a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" 14 The myth had been told dozens of times, and Homer, Virgil, and Dante had extracted all possible meanings. Joyce was also adverse to using a conceptual psychological interpretation; for example, to see Ulysses's descent into the underworld in Jungian terms as a temporary renewal by a return to

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childhood. Moreover, by the time Joyce was writing, classical scholars and anthropologists like Robertson Smith and Miiller, not to mention Frazer, had produced their reductive summaries of myths so that there was very little left to be expanded. Joyce therefore seized upon one striking feature of myth: its polyguity. If he could retell the story of Ulysses so that it left hundreds of meanings open and unsaid, he thought he had achieved his goal. Most readers have misunderstood what he had been doing and have instead been impressed by the technique of the interior monologue and have sincerely believed that Joyce had portrayed what William James called "the stream of consciousness." As argued, Henry James's artful devices came closer to doing justice to William James's stream of consciousness than the ordinariness of Joyce's interior monologues. The story as well as the characters of his Ulysses are endlessly and painfully banal because everything about them and around them had to be left open in order to preserve the polyguity of the myth. It was for this reason that he decided to persevere and to tell a story in which the polyguity was transferred from the story to the language in which it was told. Private subjectivity (the silence of the neurons) and myth have at least that much in common: both are polyguous; that is, open to many different interpretations. So far I have examined writers who have endeavored to describe or represent the psyche in as raw a state as possible. They have been doing psychology in the true sense of the word. Paradoxically, the pickings have been very thin. This is hardly surprising. If one tries to represent or describe something that is as evanescent as the silence of the neurons as it is in itself, no body of knowledge can be expected to emerge. Wittgenstein said, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent."15 Rousseau and Joyce, in trying not to remain silent about things one cannot speak of, were writing in flagrant defiance of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was wrong in thinking that once attention is drawn to this matter people will remain silent, but he was right in thinking that the attempt to break the silence without recourse to an extraneous scaffolding which is extrapsychological is bound to fail. Without such recourse, one cannot say much or say anything that is intelligible. Let me therefore now turn to a few writers who have said something. It will, however, be discovered that they went beyond the psyche and that what they are describing is in fact not the psyche in its raw state but the psyche in its interpreted state. Such interpretation must be considered hypothetical, though, understandably enough, these writers would not have conceded the purely hypothetical nature of what they are telling us about the psyche. Two of the most rewarding writers in this context are Jane Austen and Stendhal. Both lived in a time of rapid change, so no technique of

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the manufacture of eloquence could be taken for granted. In quieter times, habits of eloquence are so built into the social fabric that they are followed without hesitation and not questioned by anybody. Richardson and Fielding described states of mind without doubt and hesitation and their attributions were not questioned by anybody nor considered questionable by themselves. The cases of Jane Austen and Stendhal are very different. They had to work hard to manufacture eloquence so that they could describe the states of mind of their characters. It may seem far-fetched to compare two authors who had little more in common than the fact that they were contemporaries. One, a woman, living in complete isolation in the English countryside; the other, a man of cosmopolitan dimensions, widely travelled and well connected. But just as Goethe in far away Weimar had as good a grasp of the coming industrial revolution as Adam Smith himself, so did Jane Austen in most of her novels intuit the significance of the fact that her social milieu and its people were living in the ever decreasing margin of an old order. In this sense, a comparison with Stendhal is revealing and fruitful. Both Stendhal and Jane Austen were writers who realized that the psyche in its raw condition is beyond reach and that, in other words, one cannot do psychology. They had recourse to extrapsychological devices in order to give an intelligible account of the states of mind of their characters. Jane Austen, not altogether surprisingly, reached backward, and Stendhal, as one might expect, reached forward. In order to describe states of mind, one has to use a technique that envelops and defines them. Such envelopes can be derived from all manner of fields. To make a long story short, Jane Austen derived them from the field of conventional, bourgeois eighteenth-century morals, and Stendhal, from his observation of the overbearing dash of Napoleon's elan. For interest's sake, though there will be no detailed discussion of this, one should also think of Goethe, another contemporary of both Jane Austen and Stendhal. In his novel Elective Affinities he used Neoplatonism as a guide to the states of mind of his characters.16 Jane Austen, uncertain as she must be about the psyche in the raw, identifies states of mind in terms of conventional morals: "I am sure you have a grateful heart, that could never receive kindness without wishing to return it," or, "A friendship between two so very dear to him was exactly what he could have wished."17 We are not told why they were so "dear," but there is no uncertainty as to why he had that "wish." Consider Emma: "I am very much [prejudiced] and without being at all ashamed of it. My love for Mr. and Mrs. Weston gives me a decided prejudice in his favour."18 The same love for the Westons is a moral obligation which prejudices Knightley against Frank Churchill. This moral obligation defines Knightley's state of mind.

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These are random snippets. The acid test of Jane Austen's method is how she imagines people fall in love. "They were gradually acquainted, and when acquainted, rapidly and deeply in love. It would be difficult to say which had seen highest perfection in the other," or, "He was presented to her and she did not think too much had been said in his praise She felt immediately that she should like him."19 In Pride and Prejudice there is much talk of Elizabeth's "tumult of her mind," and "whether she wished or feared it most, she could scarcely determine."20 But the resolution is always determined by moral considerations: "If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth's change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty"21 In short, in Jane Austen the feeling of love is determined by what people ought to love, and that moral imperative is in turn determined by the values of eighteenth-century prudence, probity, and respectability We must also note how Jane Austen deals with the self-discovery of her heroines. Neuronally, the self is nebulous. One can interpret one's self almost any way one likes. But Jane Austen is very eloquent about the selves of her heroines, and since such eloquence is not a description of neuronal nebulousness, she must get the ability to be eloquent about such a nebulous phenomenon as the self from somewhere else. She gets it from very old-fashioned moral precepts.22 Elizabeth discovers her self (i.e., she hypothetically imputes a label to the somatic marker of her neuronal silence) when she submits to the ultimate moral imperative: She marries a lovable (meaning "good") man. Emma submits to loving her father (i.e., Mr. Knightley), who is the next best thing to her father. She identifies her neuronal silence as an acceptance of the authority a dutiful daughter ought to accept; that is, the authority of a father figure. For that matter, Edmund, at the end of Mansfield Park, marries Fanny, who is explicitly and designedly described in the very beginning as his sister.23 Now let us look at Stendhal's heroes. Julien Sorel has great difficulty in finding a suitable hypothesis about his state of mind when he meets Madame de Renal and Mademoiselle de la Mole. His "tumult" is resolved, but in a direction that is the very opposite of the resolution found by Jane Austen's heroines. Where they grasp at the morals of probity and respectability, Julien Sorel is inspired by Napoleon. He decides that he "ought" to seduce them because this is what is required by Napoleonic elan. Like Napoleon at Marengo, Julien, "his teeth clenched with rage and his eyes wide open towards a sky furrowed with lightning... cried in his heart: T'd deserve to be overwhelmed by it if I went to sleep in a storm! On to the conquest of another snivelling hypocrite!'"24 Julien is quite explicit that Napoleon inspired him and that he interprets his own psyche in Napoleonic terms: an outcast, an

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underprivileged young man, determined to make a dash for it and cover himself with glory. The image of Napoleon provides the labels he gives to his feelings which would otherwise remain inchoate. In Jane Austen the tumultuous feeling we slapdashly call "love" is identified with the help of a moral precept: One loves because the loved person is respectable, good, and deserving of love. In Stendhal, that same feeling is identified in terms of a willful image the hero has of himself as a Napoleonic superman. Why were Jane Austen and Stendhal free to chose the frame they wanted to put around the psyches of their characters? In every society, conventional interpretations of states of mind are ready to hand and people who grow up in a society know perfectly well what they are. Guidelines for the definition of the neuronal silence are publicly current and are used effectively to interpret other people as well as one's own self. There is no need to search or construct. There is little room for argument, though disagreements may and do occur. People are nurtured into a given folk psychology and pursue it without being aware that they are doing so. But when social changes are speeded up and exceed their own slow inner momentum, there comes an uncertainty as to what that folk psychology actually is. In such situations, the construction of a scaffold for the definition of states of mind becomes an almost self-conscious task because there is a certain freedom of choice as to where one wants to gather the extrapsychological material for the interpretation of the psyche from. Both Jane Austen and Stendhal were living in a time of speeded-up change and could not entirely depend on finding the material for such interpretation ready made to hand and accepted without question. There is no need to say much about Stendhal's appreciation of the speed of change. Although he came from a well-to-do bourgeois family in Grenoble and pursued a steady career in the public service through Revolution, the Napoleonic era, and the Restoration, unlike the Vicar of Bray he was very conscious of the precariousness of social convention and of the freedom of choice which that precariousness provided. The case of Jane Austen is less blatant. Though the uneventful course of her life bears comparison with the steadiness of Stendhal's official career, we only have to go to one of her novels in order to appreciate how clearly she understood the fragility of her society and the uncertainty of folk-psychological conventions. Northanger Abbey is not considered her masterpiece, but it gives us a better insight into her own uncertainties than any of the other novels, with the possible exception of Mansfield Park. But since in Mansfield Park these uncertainties are more convoluted than in Northanger Abbey, I will concentrate on the latter. For that matter, she was quite outspoken about the changes in

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other novels. In Persuasion she speaks of "feelings . . . too strict to suit the unfeudal tone of the present day" 25 Northanger Abbey is painted on a brilliant canvas which illustrates the uncertainties of social change. To start with, old General Tilney has to rely on Thorpes's untrustworthy information about Catherine's financial expectations. In the old feudal world, those expectations would not have been in doubt and could have been ascertained from a source more reliable than the blustering Thorpe. Jane Austen knew that that world was gone, or at least was going. The people she knew were not working and earning their living. They depended on incomes derived from investments, mainly in sugar plantations, and they knew how that income was shrinking so that they were living more and more on the margin. The old General was at sea about Catherine and depended on unreliable information. That information comes from an unsteady character, an untrustworthy suitor, and a man who breathes unreliable information the way other people have diarrhea. In turn, Catherine senses there is evil in the old General. She is accustomed to identify evil in terms of gothic horrors and therefore casts the General in the role of a gothic villain who keeps his wife locked up in a dungeon. When she discovers that her gothic fantasies were wrong, it turns out that she was wrong only in the interpretation of evil. In the reality of the burgeoning capitalist world, the old General is indeed an evil brute, but the brutality is in his commercial entrepreneurship, not in his gothic villainy. The novel is a marvellous description of the changing interpretation of a brutal mind. All this goes to show that eloquence about something like the psyche, which is opaque and nebulous, is no easy task. The universal practice of folk psychology tends to hide the difficulty of the task, just as it remained hidden from Moliere's bourgeois gentilhomme that he had been speaking prose all his life. Let us now, in conclusion, turn to the greatest manufacturer of such eloquence, Sigmund Freud, and to his claim that his manufactured article was, unlike Jane Austen's and Stendhal's, not arbitrarily chosen. The reason for now going straight to Freud is that his manufacture was exceptional. It not only provided a vocabulary to place moods into a verbal frame, but also included an explanation of why there had been so many other vocabularies and why and how they should be superseded. Freud's vocabulary was unique because it was not just one more vocabulary, but a vocabulary to end all other vocabularies. Freud claimed, no more and no less, that there were solid scientific reasons for his specially manufactured eloquence. It was an essential and inherently necessary claim of his manufactured article that all other manufactures were not invalid but had to be understood as so many evasions and suppressions of the one and true manufacture. This claim amounted

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to the view that psychological statements correspond to the psyche, a claim which, if the argument of Chapter 1 is correct, cannot possibly, under any circumstances, be substantiated. The case of Freud is so widely discussed that it may seem superfluous to bring him in again, but there is good reason. Freud is usually discussed as a chapter in the history of thought in general and of psychology in particular. This is all very well, but likely to mislead. I propose to locate Freud among the manufacturers of eloquence, rather than among the practitioners of science. If one approaches Freud as a manufacturer of eloquence, one is placing him, in the first instance, with literature. One can then examine his claim that his manufacture, unlike literary manufactures, has the status of a science without the prejudice which is generated if one starts by examining him as a chapter in the history of science. In the history of science it is assumed from the outset that he was a scientist and, eventually, by many critics, it is denied that he was. I propose to turn the discussion around. Harold Bloom writes, "Freud has more in common with Proust and Montaigne than with biological scientists, because his interpretations . . . are mediated always by texts, first by literary texts of others, and then by his own earlier texts.... Freud wrote no definitive single text; but the canon of Freud's writings shows an increasingly uneasy sense that he had become his own precursor, and that he had begun to defend himself against himself by deliberately audacious arrivals at final positions."26 My reasons for starting by taking Freud out of the history of science and placing him into the history of literature are slightly different from the reasons given by Bloom for putting him into the history of literature. I am not concerned with a canon, but I agree that the history of literature consists of challenges presented by one's precursors and it seems to me of interest to note that Freud's theories were mediated at first by other people's texts and that, in the end, he was his own canon because he used his own earlier texts as a challenge. Since in psychology there is no subject matter over and above what people say and write, there is nothing to be observed other than what other people had written or said. Psychology, for this reason, is exclusively concerned with what other people have said and written. My own reason for placing Freud with literature is that since psychology has no subject matter one cannot apply epistemological standards to psychological propositions and contentions. The psyche is not something one can have knowledge of. It is not an object of knowledge, not something to be known. All psychology must therefore be considered as a manufactured article. Let us therefore look at Freud's manufacture first and then examine his claim that that manufacture was special and, unlike other manufactures, neither arbitrary nor controlled by a given cultural milieu.

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Where Stendhal looked to Napoleon and Jane Austen to conventional morality as a source for eloquence, Freud claimed that his eloquence was derived from scientific evidence. When Jane Austen's Emma married her father or the next best thing to it in the person of Mr. Knightley, or when Fanny marries her brother or the next best thing to it in the person of her cousin Edmund, she described the state of mind that made them do so as a recognition of moral duty. In Emma's case, it was duty to her biological father which made her love her father's friend. In the case of Fanny of Mansfield Park, it was Edmund's realization that Fanny had grown up in "poverty and neglect" which obliged this "dear sweet-tempered boy" to be in love with her.27 When Stendhal's hero seduced a woman he did so because he felt like Napoleon at Marengo or Austerlitz. Freud would have said that in both cases there was delusion. In reality, Freud would have said, Jane Austen's heroines married their fathers (or the next best thing) because they were victims of their Oedipal desires; and Julien Sorel, in the absence of a mother, seduced the women within reach because he was not such a victim but Napoleonic enough to indulge his Oedipal wishes freely. It all depends on how one constructs the psyche, not on how the psyche is. We must seek to understand this claim correctly Freud did not, like other scientists before him and after him, seek to produce a science of the psyche by reducing it to neurology; that is, by saying that fears and hatreds, loves and phobias, are really neuronal events. He claimed scientific status for his manufactured eloquence because he wanted to provide a science of folk psychology. That is, he wanted to stay with the conventional descriptions of states of mind as states of mind. He merely claimed that there was one set of descriptions which revealed what those states of mind really amounted to as states of mind. To be sure, at the beginning he had tried his hand at some form of neuroscience and had despaired of it. The remainder of his life was dedicated to tackling the problem of what we know about minds in terms of psychology. Freudian eloquence about states of mind is so well known that only the briefest and roughest outline is necessary. For the rest of this book, we will be concerned with the legitimacy of his claim that that eloquence, as distinct from other eloquences, was special because it was scientific. Freud manufactured a vocabulary to speak about states of mind on the understanding that the human body was primarily a bundle of wishes to have its needs satisfied. Some of the wishes concerned food, but for the most part they concerned the erogenous zones of the body. At birth, the infant was polymorphously perverse: Almost any stimulation anywhere would be exciting and could lead to satisfaction. During growth, two powerful directives controlled the organization of those

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zones. There was first the genital organization, which tended to take attention away from zones other than the genital ones; and further, there was the need to repress or delay the wish to have even the genital zones satisfied because there was a sociocultural need to control conception and reproduction. Hence, the distinction between the primary process which was controlled by pure pleasure seeking and the secondary process which is controlled by the collision of the original libido machine with the real world. This led Freud to think in terms of an almost Piaget-like development of the organism.28 This development is crucial because it links the polymorphous perverse pleasures of food and excretion of the early infant to the eventual channelling of pleasure into the genitally erogenous zones. In "normal" development we thus get, first, a stage of autoerotism; then, a stage of narcissism, in which the organism is taking itself as a love object; and, finally, a stage of object love, where the object from which pleasure is derived lies outside one's own body and is an object other than one's own body rather than part of one's own body 29 However, the succession of these stages is not automatic, let alone mechanical, and certainly, unlike Piaget's stages, not set in concrete. Piaget's stages can only be interfered with by physical impairment, but the Freudian stages of ontogenetic development can be interfered with and diverted as well as perverted by the conflict between the primary and the secondary process. In normal development, the infant starts with autoerotic activity such as masturbation. This would change into ordinary narcissism, where the child's body loves itself, and, finally, the adult would direct his or her libido toward another object. However, such development is often deflected by an attempt to embellish autoerotism by a neurotic fantasy that the child was seduced by somebody30 This last part of Freud's manufactured article requires a special explanation, for it cannot be a very obvious let alone plausible part of any story that a fantasy of having been seduced should emerge. However, Freud made his own story quite plausible. He told us that initially the two drives, hunger and libido, are hardly distinct, for anal and oral stimulation which derive from food intake to still hunger precede any kind of genital response to stimulation. Moreover, libido is at first quite unspecific, in that the organism's bisexuality has to be taken into account.31 For this reason, one cannot describe an organism in early life as homosexual. At best, "homosexual" at this stage is an imprecise term.32 Hence, there is a permanent obstacle to an intelligible description of the child's early libido.33 What does all this amount to in practice? It amounts, first of all, to saying that the mother arouses a number of physical sensations, both pleasurable and unpleasurable, by her mere care of the child's body

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and thus becomes its first "seducer." The child's first erotic object is the mother's breast that nourishes it. Love has its origin in attachment to the satisfied need for nourishment.34 Freud writes, "We must bear in mind that the sexual impulses in particular are extraordinarily plastic. . . . One of them can take the place of another. . . . They are related to one another like a network of channels filled with a liquid."35 Initially there is a bundle of stimulations and satisfactions, anal, oral, and, eventually, genital. The infant cannot distinguish one from the other. But in later life, thinking back or trying to think back, one's experiences of, say, anal stimulation could easily be remembered as genital stimulation. For by this time the eloquence is manufactured on the basis of nothing more than what was inchoate mood. Since libido displays a resourceful mobility in the search for satisfaction, "sexual life" includes all expressions of tender feelings which spring from sources of primitive feeling (i.e., presexual, anal, and oral excitation).36 This led Freud to his stories that children are not sexually innocent. Though the possibility of infantile sexuality had been adumbrated before Freud by Henry Maudsley, Freud's story stunned.37 Stunning as it is, we must understand it correctly. Freud was not saying that children are sexually alert. He was saying that since they do not distinguish clearly between anal, oral, and genital excitation they are not innocent of excitation and the pleasures and displeasures that can be derived from them. In this form, his story was not that stunning at all. But it was to become a strong ingredient in his view (which will be discussed in the next chapter) that fantasies or wishes can have as pathogenic a consequence as real events. For if everything other than the mood itself is a piece of manufactured eloquence, it does not matter where the mood itself comes from—whether it is produced by a stimulation of the genital area in an actual seduction or by comparable anal or oral excitation which takes place in the normal course of events. The story that there was a wish to be genitally seduced by the parent of the opposite sex—the famous Oedipal desire—is not part of the mood itself but an eloquent imprint upon the mood. The nonspecific mood can be interpreted by a variety of different stories, among which the actual seduction by a parent or the wish to be seduced by a parent are only two possibilities. The story that even small children and infants are driven by sexual desires is as plausible as Stendhal's story that heroes seek to imitate Napoleon's elan or Jane Austen's story that heroines always fall in love with men whom they can approve of morally in terms of eighteenthcentury moral conventions. It becomes more so when one realizes that sexual desires in early infancy are not genitally structured but are ploymorphous perverse (i.e., have an oral and anal orientation). Thus,

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some people may claim in later life that they have been sexually seduced when all that happened was that they were orally (feeding) or anally (being put on the potty) aroused. When Freud tells us that an infant's libido is directed toward a member of its own family, he does not mean that the female infant wishes to have sexual intercourse with the father. He means, in terms of his own Piaget-like view of ontogenetic development, that it has anal and oral wishes directed toward the father and, what is more, that in the early stages of development these wishes are not even directed to the parents of the opposite sex. They are truly polymorphously perverse. With the realization that infants are polymorphously perverse, Freud comes close to the view, advanced in Chapter 1, that neuronally produced awareness of somatic markers is inchoate. He did not put it in those terms, but one could argue that this is what he meant. The excitations experienced by the young infant are not structured and there is no clear distinction between anal, oral, and genital excitation. The pleasure or displeasures that follow from them are mere moods, not defined emotions. The rest—stories that the father seduced or that the infant wished to be genitally seduced—are later interpretations and stand to the mere mood in a purely hypothetical relationship; that is, in a merely interpretative relationship which can neither be verified nor falsified. Freud's elaborate story that the infant's first wish is for an incestuous union with the parent of the opposite sex could be made to look quite plausible if one remembers that in Freud's story there is no hard and fast division between anal, oral, and genital pleasure. It is conceivable, therefore, that an adult might recall or agree to remember, at the suggestion of a therapist, that he or she had had infantile sexual desires for the parent of the opposite sex when all that really happened and all that he or she ought to be able to recall, if anything, given the absence of words at that early age, is that he or she had experienced pleasure when breast fed or put on the potty by either parent. In a lighter vein, I should perhaps add that Freud's stories about the human organism as a pan-libido machine led him to some very hairy and extravagant anecdotes, because he felt committed to explain all of human culture and its history in terms of libido and its repression or control. Thus, he held that humans managed to appropriate for themselves the use of fire when men started to repress their (innate?) homosexuality, for their homosexuality had made them urinate competitively upon fire and had extinguished it.38 Only a repression of their homosexuality and the cessation of this competitive practice allowed fire to continue burning and to be appropriated for domestic use. Women, by contrast, had been prevented by their anatomy from using fire for com-

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parable competitive purposes and therefore became the guardians of the hearth as soon as men stopped displaying their homosexuality. As a result of the stages of development, the adult individual, though no longer polymorphously perverse, achieves this adulthood either by the repression or by the sublimation of the initial wishes. But given the initial all-powerful drive which made infants have those wishes, their repression could not make them disappear. They remain a powerful presence and influence—maliciously, pathologically, benevolently, sublimatedly, but always clandestinely—every state of mind. Therefore, even when people are thinking they are acting in the course of duty, of self-sacrificial love, of dedication to a moral, aesthetic, or political ideal, they are really being manipulated by those repressed but ineliminable wishes. These wishes are related ambivalently even to what appear to us to be the most positive forces in our lives. Everything in one's life is affected by those early experiences, and our unconscious, into which those early experiences have been repressed and where they lie, determines everything we do in our conscious life (i.e., how we verbally construct our states of mind).39 Freud had a boundless energy for storytelling and confabulation and in his long life produced stories about Moses, Leonardo da Vinci, and President Wilson in these terms. In this way, Freud created a full vocabulary for speaking about and naming the nebulous, opaque, inchoate whirrings and buzzes which are produced by neurons. The Freudian vocabulary of wishes is a perfect example of how Freud managed to manufacture eloquence about silent neurons. The initial pan-libidinal drive which caused the infant's polymorphous perversity and covered food as well as excretion was a set of neuronal events. The phenomenon is as biological as can be, but as soon as the word "wish" is introduced we come to a verbal articulation of neuronal events. The neurons themselves do not "wish." They simply do and their doing is a function of their structure. The interpretation of those doings as wishes is an instance of the manufacture of eloquence, and from this manufacture the rest follows: Neurons cannot be repressed, but wishes can. By taking into account that any state of mind is likely to be the result of a wish one is not aware of, the Freudian vocabulary could cover the entire gamut of neuronal silence, sometimes overtly so, but for the most part obliquely so, by looking upon any one label of a state of mind as a symbol of something else. There can be, it is contended, and all stories are constructed according to this contention, no exceptions and no exemptions. Even the most rational daily wish or thought about friends, politics, household chores, or what have you would be covered by this eloquent vocabulary in which almost everything we do and think is

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due either to the repression or to the sublimation of the initial wishes. In this important sense, the Freudian vocabulary was able to replace and supersede all previous vocabularies. Jane Austen's and Stendhal's eloquence, in this view, were not wrong, but a mere cover up of what the states of mind concerned were really like. With this little word, "really," the manufacture of eloquence claimed to go beyond mere manufacture. The Freudian vocabulary itself included a claim that one was now getting to the bottom of the matter; in this case, to the bottom of the psyche, a claim which no earlier vocabulary had included. This claim was not made separately or as an addition. It was implied by the way Freudian eloquence is manufactured. As a wit once summed it up, Freud wanted us to realize that when we think we do not think what we think we think, but we think what we don't think we think. NOTES 1. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). 2. Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 327. 3. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne O. Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), Vol. 3, 260, Friday, 11 October 1929. 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1959-), 1003; in trans. John Gould Fletcher, The Reveries of a Solitary (London: Routledge, 1927), 48-49. 5. Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, 18-20. 6. For Rousseau's departure from the traditional plot, see Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isolt, ed. A. Closs (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), xxv-xxvii; Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1940), 216. See also F. C. Green, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 189. 7. J. Guehenno, Jean-Iacques Rousseau, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). See also J. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. R. J. Morrissey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 7-9. 8. The Correspondence of William lames, vol. 3, ed. I. K. Skrupskelis and E. M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 301, William James to Henry James, 22 October 1905. 9. William James, Principles of Psychology, ed. Margaret Knight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), 96. 10. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: Dell, 1958), 88. 11. Ibid., 332. 12. Ibid., 342. 13. Henry James, Hawthorne (London: Macmillan, 1883), 41. 14. T. S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," in Selected Prose ofT S. Eliot, ed. F. Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 177. 15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7.

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16. See B. Buschendorf, Goethes mythische Denkform. Zur Ikonographie der "Wahlverwandtschaften" (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986). 17. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 61, 224. 18. Jane Austen, Emma (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 167. 19. Jane Austen, Persuasion (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947), 24. Austen, Emma, 202. 20. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 172, 236. 21. Ibid., 246. 22. M. Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 295-299. Butler is the only critic who has cottoned on to Jane Austen's source of eloquence. 23. Austen, Mansfield Park, 44. 24. Stendhal, Scarlet and Black, trans. M. R. B. Shaw (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 200, 212, 227, 334, 417. 25. Austen, Persuasion, 136. 26. Harold Bloom, "Freud and the Sublime," in Agon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 117-118. 27. Austen, Mansfield Park, 44. 28. Chomsky's notorious attack on and dismissal of Piaget at a symposium in Royaumont in 1975 was based on a complete misunderstanding of Piaget's notion of development. Piaget is talking about a necessary, genetically programmed unfolding of stages. Chomsky mistook him to be thinking, like Skinner, of a gradual acquisition or learning of faculties of thinking from experience. 29. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 19551964), 12: 60-61 (hereafter cited as S.E.). 30. S.E., 14:18. 31. S.E., 7:220. 32. S.E., 18: 170. 33. S.E., 19:33. 34. S.E., 23: 180. 35. S.E., 16:345. 36. S.E., 11:222. 37. Peter Gay, Freud (London: Papermac, 1989), 144. 38. S.E., 21: 90. 39. S.E., 15: 21,109; 14: 166-167.

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3 Scientific Misadventures

REPRESSION "We think what we don't think we think." This little word, "don't," encapsulates, as Freud himself frequently stressed, the core of his psychological understanding. It concerns the phenomenon of repression. Some wishes are repressed and, as he was to argue, sit in the unconscious and act from there to cause mischief unless they are released and brought out into the open. "The division of the psychical," Freud wrote, "into what is conscious and unconscious is the fundamental premise of psychoanalysis."1 The idea that there is repression is the cornerstone of Freud's psychology2 As R. Wollheim once put it, "Freud's life work was a research into the deafness of the mind." 3 The question, of course, is not only whether he was right in claiming that there is deafness but also whether his explanation of its causes is tenable or helpful. I think that Sulloway is wrong in saying that there was a triumvirate of ideas—resistance, repression, and censorship.4 The notions of both resistance and censorship simply follow from the central idea that there is repression: "Even things that seem completely forgotten are present somewhere and somehow."5 With this last statement, Freud went beyond everything that had been said about repression before him and opened up a new vista. For, before Freud, when people had thought of repression they had thought of something being put away or kept down and under control. Whether he was right or wrong in opening this new vista remains to be seen.

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The idea that a great many of our wishes have to be repressed goes back at least to Plato and was most probably known long before Plato. Repression of many wishes is simply required by social order and for the sake of our cooperation with our fellow humans. Plato explained how the psyche consists of a lot of wild horses controlled by a charioteer. As long as the charioteer (i.e., reason) remains in his seat and keeps the reins firmly in hand, the man or woman will be able to lead a satisfying and acceptable life. Once controlled, the wild horses of desire remain controlled and, as long as they remain so, reason is in charge. Christian teaching slightly shifted the nuances of this scheme by indicating that the charioteer needs some or possibly a lot of divine assistance, in the form of grace, to keep the sinful passions down. Freud completely altered and revolutionized this way of understanding repression. Before him, the Platonic view had been accepted: We control our wishes and passions and appetites by repressing them. Once repressed, they may trouble and deceive the charioteer, but as long as they are kept under they remain impotent and harmless. Only the sleep of reason, Goya famously illustrated, breeds monsters. Not so, said Freud. Kept under, they cause as much or more trouble than when allowed free rein. Hysterics suffer from memories, he said, and these memories can be memories of unfulfilled wishes as soon as of fulfilled ones. In his view, a repressed wish enters the unconscious and keeps operating from there, no matter how firmly the charioteer has managed to repress it. It is clear that in the Freudian scheme the activities of the unconscious are the be all and end all of psychic activity. The elaboration of this scheme was enormously revolutionary and the postulation that there is an unconscious and that wishes cannot be eliminated except by relegation to the unconscious was an enormous enormity, for it introduced what has proved to be an inherently unscientific form of reasoning into the understanding of the psyche. Because of this enormity, we will have to conclude that Freud's psychology was scientistic, rather than scientific. The difference between these two concepts was well observed by Medawar, when he put his finger on the difference between Freud and Darwin.6 For Freud there was no progressive research program, but for Darwin there was. Darwin's empirical foundations may not have been much better than Freud's, but for Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection there emerged a whole gamut of subsequent theories which cohered with it.7 Freud's system of psychology, on the other hand, remained isolated. However, to do justice to Freud, I will show that it did so in order to make psychology more, not less scientific. "Our assumption of the unconscious is necessary and legitimate and we possess numerous proofs of its existence."8

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I do not mean to overrate the revolutionary element in Freud's thought, but rather try to define it precisely. The first outspoken reversal of the Platonic scheme is to be found in Shakespeare's trenchant line, "Thought's the slave of life." This verse indicates that Shakespeare took it that Plato's charioteer, far from being the master of the passions, was their slave. The point was further stressed by Hume, who was very skeptical of the charioteer's independence. Shakespeare and Hume stood Plato on his head. If thought is the slave of life, reason can never be in control. Life is. Whatever we fancy to be the dictate of reason is in reality the force of life in disguise. Plato thought that reason can repress some things. Hume thought that reason cannot repress anything, but can, on the contrary only recommend what life demands. Rousseau too stood the Platonic scheme on its head when he pointed out that the charioteer was corrupt and ought to be held under by the passions which were pure and good, provided they had not in turn been corrupted by the charioteer. Nietzsche, in turn, contributed his own powerful insights into the inadequacy of the charioteer. He went one better than Rousseau in thinking that the passions were as corrupt as the charioteer himself. Our rational lives, he said, are a coverup of our will to power, a will which is the real unconscious force. We must unmask that coverup. But for Nietzsche, this will was a biological urge, not something that had been repressed or suppressed to become unconscious. Freud went a little bit further than any of these skeptics of the charioteer's powers. No matter how hard you try, he said, the passions will control the charioteer. Their goodness is neither here nor there. The wishes are a biological phenomenon and cannot be kept under, let alone destroyed. The charioteer is, at best and at his most successful, a guide who can steer them from one course into another. We cannot, he said, cure anybody of their nasty passions. The most we can hope for is the possibility of converting hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness. It is widely alleged that repression a la Freud does not and cannot occur. Freud's proofs that it does—his books on jokes and Freudian slips—contain ingenious examples of alleged occurrences, but not of proofs. In these books, slips and unintended sayings are explained by the postulate that repression occurs, but there is no proof that there could not be other explanations. Attempts to prove that repression occurs must be, in the nature of the case, unsuccessful. Experiments with subliminal perception and reasoning have proved positive, but are irrelevant because subliminal perception and subliminal reasoning are completely different phenomena and have nothing to do with repression of experiences and wishes into the unconscious from where they remain causally efficacious.9 But when all this is said, the allegation that repression does not occur is as unfounded as the allegation that it

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does occur. The point is that its occurrence is postulated, not observed. And the reason why it is postulated is that it straps psychological reasoning into a causally deterministic framework in which all states of mind are rationally caused by an intelligible sequence of events. The postulate that our actions and thoughts are due to our unconscious serves to secure deterministic causality. There is, for example, no such thing as an overreaction or a misreaction. An action, Freud argued, is only "over-" or "mis-" if we look at the conscious state of mind it pretends to derive from. The moment we look at the unconscious cause, every action is determinately adequate and causally controlled.10 Without the postulation of unconscious psychological activity, psychological activity dissolves into a disconnected, haphazard series of events.11 It may sound odd when we say of Freud, who is popularly known as the discoverer of the omnipotence of and universality of irrational impulses and appetites which have to be straitjacketed and repressed, that he offered an explanation why there are no irrational and unintelligible actions or thoughts. But the point is that in the Freudian scheme of things, no matter how crazy it may seem for a man to rob a bank or gouge out the eyes of horses, there is always a very good reason for such acts (e.g., he has failed to sublimate his castration anxiety). In short, with the help of the postulate that repression a la Freud (distinct from the conventional repression which is not questioned by anybody because it does not result in active unconscious content) takes place, psychology could be seen to have become an intelligible science of our states of mind, of what causes them, and what reasons there are for them. Freud was not the discoverer of irrationality but the inventor of a postulate that reduced irrationality to perfectly rational sequences of events. Psychoanalysis, Freud wrote, is not mainly for therapy of neuroses: "It was also a new psychology... and had become the name of a science—the science of unconscious mental processes."12 The postulate was to lead to a "strict and universal application of determinism to mental life—a determinism which, lacking an organic deficit, is itself 'psychical.'"13 The best way to explain how Freud arrived at the enormity involved in taking his view of the psyche beyond Hume, Rousseau, and Nietzsche by introducing, for scientific reasons, a scientifically dubious, perhaps untenable, postulate, is to provide a rational reconstruction of his ideas; that is, "rational" rather than historical in Lakatos's sense of the term. I will not provide yet another intellectual biography of Freud, nor do I wish to compete with or provide an alternative to such purely historical books as, for example, R. E. Fancher's Psychoanalytical Psychology: The Development of Freud's Thought.141 will try, instead, to relate how and when some ideas came to him and how and why they led

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him to further ideas by doing a rational reconstruction of the sequence of his thoughts. A CRISIS IN SCIENTIFIC THINKING Quite early in his career, Freud encountered two major crises: his break with Breuer and his growing doubts about his seduction theory. Both crises led him to the staggering realization that hysterical symptoms can result from imaginary events as soon as from real ones. Had he left this realization as it stood, he would have been faced by a nondeterministic psychology in which anything could happen. Such nondeterminism was unacceptable because it was, by the standards of his age, unscientific. It would have amounted to the view that where the mind is concerned, there is nothing but unpredictable chance. Obviously, Freud could not leave it at that. So, as a result of the crises, Freud invented a way out. He postulated that parts of the mind are unconscious and that we must suppose that imagined events only seemed imagined but were in reality the effect of the part of the mind we are not conscious of. Though fictional and manufactured, they were manufactured in obedience to those parts of the mind we are unconscious of. At first sight, such a thought of a mind we are not conscious of looks like a contradiction in terms, for as was argued in Chapter 1, the only events we are not conscious of are the neuronal events which do not amount to anything other than chemicophysical occurrences. But when Freud added that the only reason why we are not conscious of those parts of the mind is that they had once been conscious parts and then repressed, the net outcome of his thought was positive. It enabled Freud to weave both real and imagined events into a deterministic framework and thus salvage psychology as a science in spite of the staggering realization that was forced on him by the two crises. Breuer, who had intially cooperated with him, bowed out when he came face to face with the power of fantasy. When Bertha Pappenheim, one of his women patients, the famous Anna O., alleged that she had been made pregnant by him, Breuer, who knew perfectly well that she was not speaking the truth but was fantasising, took cover. In his mind, if the treatment of hysterical symptoms led to the discovery of sexual repressions this was one thing and had already been adumbrated by Charcot. But if it led to the discovery of sexual fantasies, that was another matter which he, a straight scientist, would have no truck with. For Breuer, fantasies could not be alleged to be pathogenic and causally efficacious. A fantasy was something that had not occurred. To claim that even though an event had not occurred it could have consequences was like claiming that a man had been flattened even though

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he had not been run over by a steamroller. His decision not to persist with this line of inquiry cannot have had anything to do with the question of sex as such, for he had been perfectly willing to consider the possibility that hysterical paralysis was caused by sexual repression. His abandonment of the inquiry centered on the question of fantasy as opposed to reality (i.e., whether an imagined or merely desired event can have the same causal efficacy as a real event). Breuer, who considered himself a man of science and who took science to be a pursuit that dealt with reality, took umbrage at the suggestion that imagined events might have to be taken as seriously as real events. Freud, his cooperator, was a man of a very different stamp. With the true instinct of the explorer he recognized at once that the inquiry, far from leading into pseudoscience, was now becoming really interesting because it was leading into new territory. What was at issue here was one's conception of science. For Breuer, a fantasy was an untruth, and it is of the essence of science to dismiss untruths. Freud knew as well (or should we say, cautiously, almost as well) as Breuer himself, that Bertha Pappenheim had not been made pregnant by Breuer. But he was not prepared to remove fantasies, by definition, from the scope of scientific investigation. If an astronomer says that the sun is turning around the earth, he is fantasizing. But there must be a reason for the fantasy and that reason is a legitimate object of scientific inquiry. If Bertha Pappenheim says that Breuer made her pregnant, she is fantasizing, but there must be a reason for the fantasy. A word of caution is in order. There is some doubt as to whether the Anna O. of the famous case history was actually identical with the Bertha Pappenheim investigated by later researchers. Moreover, the story of Breuer's abandonment of the case as told by Jones, whether Anna O. or Bertha Pappenheim, is due to Freud, not to Breuer.15 And, what is more, it was provided by Freud many years later. It is very probable that Freud dramatized the story16 But the point here is not what happened in Breuer's eyes, but how Freud saw the story. Like Breuer, Freud was a scientist. To be a scientist in the nineteenth century meant that one was looking for causes. The idea that events could happen without being determined by a cause would at that time have been considered a denial of science. Freud therefore had a simple choice. He could either follow Breuer's example and abandon the inquiry, or he could look for a cause of Bertha Pappenheim's fantasy. The third possibility, that people simply fantasize arbitrarily and undeterminately was not open to him. To remain within the ambit of science, one had to search for the cause of the fantasy In order to keep within the required deterministic paradigm of science, Freud thought up the idea that the reason for the fantasy must be unconscious. This was a mouthful of

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speculation. How, one might ask, could Bertha Pappenheim form a fantasy for reasons she was unconscious of (i.e., for reasons she did not know of)? Freud had no great difficulty with this problem. In order to accommodate the causal efficacy of imagined events in the deterministic paradigm, he postulated that there are preconscious instincts or wishes. These libidinal wishes determine states of mind as much as actually repressed conscious wishes. They are directly fed by the libido, which provides the dynamics of the organism. With this "ruse" the deterministic paradigm is saved, and it is now allowed that such imagined events as Breuer's sexual intercourse with Bertha Pappenheim, even though it never happened, remains compatible with strict determinism. The causal chain begins in the preconscious, goes into the unconscious, and, from there, produces fantasies just because the libidinous wish remains unconscious. Some conscious wishes are repressed and remain in the unconscious to cause trouble and turmoil in various disguises, but the preconscious libido of the biological organism is also subject to sociocultural pressures and is not allowed to inform states of mind in an undiluted way. The direction of its energy is forced to remain unconscious and from the unconscious it comes out as so many symbols of the reality of the libido. The unconscious, in short, is fed both by real, conscious wishes that are repressed into it and by preconscious libido which is prevented from coming into the open. The fantasy must be understood as a mere symbol of the repressed or, in this case, preconscious, reality—the libidinal wish. I will return to the enormity of the concept of the unconscious. For the time being, it must be clear that Freud did not himself fantasize or think in a frivolous way. He invoked—or would it be more correct to say "postulated"—that there must be the unconscious in order to keep the world safe for the determinism which he took to be the hallmark of science. He thought up the idea of the causal efficacy of the unconscious in order to be more, not less, scientific. The abandonment of the seduction theory was prompted by very similar considerations. The seduction theory had stated that hysterical symptoms were caused by repressed memories of childhood sexual seduction. When Freud "tumbled" to the fact that many women who claimed to have been seduced by their fathers were "lying," he was again confronted by a choice. He could either say to himself that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy of science and simply accept that these women, mysteriously, were lying for an unknown reason or perhaps for no reason at all. Or he could keep within the confines of the deterministic paradigm and postulate an unconscious cause of the lies. As in the case of Breuer and Bertha Pappenheim, Freud decided on the latter course. He decided to

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stay with determinism. This time his awareness of a real crisis was outspoken, as exemplified in his famous letter to Fliess of September 21,1897.17 Again, he maintained that if people can suffer from an imaginary event or if an imagined event can determine their state of mind, even if it is unconscious and they do not know that it does, the imagined event must have been caused to be in the unconscious. If it is not in the unconscious where, as a repressed real experience it ought to be, it must be there because it was put there by the preconscious. Thus he was able to mesh the imagined seductions into his causal chain even though they were imaginary; that is, even though they had never been conscious experiences or been experiences anybody had been conscious of. Here again, states of mind are determined (or, as I would prefer to say, defined) by unconscious wishes, but the content of the unconscious is, in turn, determined by the preconscious libido of the organism. AN OLD-FASHIONED CONCEPTION OF SCIENCE At this point we must stop and answer two crucial questions. First, what made Freud cling so tenaciously to a paradigm of science which equated science with determinism and materialism? He clung very tenaciously indeed and thought it was a lesser risk to introduce the concept of the unconscious than to abandon the belief in total determinism. Second, what made him form the idea that the libidinal dynamo, given that it was a bundle of appetitive matter determined by the irresistible desire to satisfy its appetites, was in the first instance, biologically speaking, an incestuous dynamo? Why did he believe that the conative libido of every infant should be directed toward the parent of the opposite sex? The theories that follow from his initial hypotheses are not difficult to swallow if the initial hypothesis is accepted. What is at issue is the initial hypothesis. If the basic situation is an Oedipal one, it stands to reason that repression must take place and that mature growth depends on a successful resolution of the repressed Oedipal desire. Alternately, if resolution does not take place, the repressed Oedipal wish must cause neurotic troubles. So I will say nothing much about these secondary theories and confine my explanation to the puzzling fact that Freud came to believe that the libidinal impulse was, in the first instance, an incestuous one. Note also that there is an asymmetry here. The Oedipus story requires the postulate that there are unconscious wishes, but the postulate that there are unconscious wishes does not require that one accepts the Oedipus story. First then, let us examine Freud's lifelong commitment to a materialistic and deterministic model of science. To us today this commitment seems strange, because we have become used to thinking of Kuhn's

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paradigm shifts, of the Enlightenment's panrational criticism, and of Popper's falsification, rather than of verification, causality, and induction as the hallmarks of what constitutes science. But Freud lived in the century of positivism which had begun with Comte and ended with Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Comte had substituted scientists for the old priests—scientists who were able to draw a clear distinction between fact and fancy and who would devote themselves to fact, not to fancy and who were not yet thinking in terms of Kuhnian paradigm shifts, of observations that were theory laden, of the epistemological contamination of all knowledge, of paradigm-dependent relativism, and of the incommensurability of the meaning of terms that belonged to different paradigms. 18 If the nineteenth century had begun with Comte, it ended, with but little change, with Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which declared that the world was the totality of discrete facts and that the truth about it consisted in the correspondence of atomic sentences to those atomic facts.19 Freud himself had been brought up in Vienna under the weighty influence of Brucke, Exner, and Meynert. Briicke "incarnated medical positivism in its most materialist form: all natural phenomena were phenomena of motion."20 Meynert's "work offered Freud a dynamic model of mental activity," and Freud reported that Meynert "proposed that I should definitely devote myself to the anatomy of the brain."21 Meynert himself belonged to a school of thought which considered it an urgent requirement "to arouse German medicine from its naturalphilosophical dream and to base it on solid, unchangeable material facts."22 As a result of these influences, Freud's first major work of synthesis, the famous Project, was conceived under the spell of this nineteenthcentury positivism tinged with materialism. In this pre-Popperian view, scientific knowledge was scientific because it was quantifiable, measurable, and hence, knowledge of material events. In such a scheme of knowledge, causal relations played an overwhelming part and to do science amounted to finding that all events were determined by causes. In the 1890s, when Freud sketched his Project, he was convinced that the scientific status of his discovery so far and of any future additions to it would depend on his ability to reduce mental events to neurological occurrences. The Project was a grand conception largely inspired and made possible by the fact that Freud was able to translate words for such mental events as "defense" and "attention" into terms related metaphorically to energy words such as "repression," "cathexis," "storage," and so forth. Freud was initially a dyed-in-the-wool Eliminative Materialist, dedicated to neurophilosophy and cognitive science long before the Churchlands and Stephen Stich were born. Once there was a

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conception of mental energy rather than just of mental events, the transition to neuronal events was tempting. "The main idea of the Project is the correlation of psychological processes with the distribution and circulation of quantities of energy throughout certain material elements, that is, hypothetical brain structures."23 Freud himself abandoned the Project almost immediately, so much so that it was never published during his lifetime. When it was finally published as a curiosity in the 1950s, it was considered a valuable illustration of some of his letters to Fliess, to whom he had written in the most glowing terms about the Project on October 20,1895.24 It is, however, highly telling that it was finally dug up again in the 1970s by neurologist Karl Pribram, who stressed that the revolution in psychology which had started in the 1960s and led to the development of so called cognitive science had greatly revived interest in Freud's undertaking to mesh psychology and neurology. One of the most promising products of cognitive science at that time was the functionalist conception, in which mental events are given their identity not by "consciousness," but by their causal relationship to other mental events as well as to their inputs into and the outputs of the nervous system. In this view, the behavior of man or machine is explained no more by the physics or chemistry of neuronal events than by "consciousness"; it is explained by the mechanism of the program which controls both physical and mental events.25 Be this as it may, although Freud abandoned the Project quite early in his life, he remained captive all along to the leading idea that any theory of mental events must be a causal theory; that mental events have causes, that causes have effects, and so forth. As Adolf Griinbaum correctly observed, "In the context of the psychoanalytical theory of psychopathology the ontological identity of unconscious ideation qua being mental rather than physical hardly robs it of its hypothesized causal role."26 In other words, although the grand plan of the Project could not be worked out, the paradigm which had inspired it remained with Freud and informed his later metapsychologies and especially the metapsychology concerned with the relation of the conscious to the unconscious. As observed, Freud tried to anticipate cognitive science. In the 1890s he hoped to replace folk psychology with a description of the mechanics of the nervous system. When he realized that such a project could not be carried out, he attributed the failure to the then so incomplete and parlous knowledge of the nervous system and decided to reach the same goal of accounting for states of mind as precisely determined and determinable events by a different route; that is, by introducing a causal factor which he called the unconscious. It was, we must conclude, second best. Even in his fifties Freud stressed to Stekel the "purely toxicological basis" of anxiety about masturbation, and a decade later

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he argued that the deficiencies of psychoanalysis "would probably vanish if we were already in a position to replace the psychological terms by physiological or chemical ones."27 This last idea, given a thought or two about Positron Emission Tomography (PET) could have come straight from Paul Churchland's The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul.28 Freud never gave up the idea that the figurative (i.e., folk psychology) language we use to deal with the psyche could and ought to, one day, translate into the language of physiology and chemistry29 When Freud in 1900 chose "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo" as motto for his book on dreams, he clearly indicated his intellectual progression from neurology to depth psychology; that is, from surface causality to hidden causality. The one thing he never gave up, because he considered it to be the hallmark of science, was the search for causal determinacy If it was not to be found on the surface where it met the eye, it had to be in hidden depths. As is well known, Freud did not invent the notion of the unconscious, but it must be stressed that in those writers in which it had occurred before Freud it had always been something that was undefined and generic—something like a blind lifeforce or an unconscious drive like the will to power or a general reservoir of energy used to power conscious motivation and capable of deflecting it from its path or intention. Freud gave the term a much more specific meaning. He postulated, in order to satisfy the need to find causes, that events we are conscious of can be "repressed" and can continue to operate in our organism as unconscious causes. His unconscious was therefore, right from the beginning, not a blind source of energy or a powerhouse, but a reservoir or receptacle of determinable events which had been pushed into it by having been initially in the conscious mind or, in some cases, by having been fed into it by preconscious wishes and appetites. It was a storehouse into which quite specific states of mind had been put. We can see therefore how widely Freud departed from thinkers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and how closely Freud remained true in his conception of the unconscious to the determinism and the materialism which had inspired the Project. Nietzsche alone had come close to being a precursor of Freud, for he thought of the unconscious not just as a blind urge, but as something more specific. He suggested that we often unconsciously deceive ourselves and hide from ourselves the baseness of our wishes and our personality We all desire to appear better than we are, but are often enough unconscious of what we really are. But not even for Nietzsche did the unconscious contain anything specific. It was merely a device which enabled us to hide from our real selves. Freud's introduction of the notion of the unconscious—or, better, Freud's postulate that there was an unconscious—was, of course, a very special move designed to save determinism. When Freud saw that

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people are not always determined in their behavior or in what they are saying by what they are conscious of, he did not abandon the concept of determinism and of causality. On the face of it and to people not captive to the deterministic and materialistic conception of what constitutes science, this would have been the obvious course. The situation was a little like the situation in physics when the peculiar behavior of quanta or special relativity were discovered. There was a choice. One could either cling to the old causal paradigm and construct an ad hoc hypothesis like the Lorentz equations or trust, as Einstein did in regard to quantum mechanics, that eventually a causal explanation would be found; or one could simply jettison the old paradigm. Freud, in this case, stuck with the old paradigm and postulated hidden or unconscious causes. He was captive to the paradigm of determinism and equated it with science, tout court. He was thus able to say, when behavior was clearly not determined by conscious motives or intentions, that it was caused by repressed (i.e., unconscious) intentions or motives. The primary role of the invention of Freud's specific (as distinct from the vague and general) theory of the unconscious was to save determinism and make psychology safe for science as he understood it. The Project had been too ambitious and was abandoned, but the conception of science that had inspired it was never given up and led directly and necessarily to the theory of the unconscious, which was invented in order to make psychology more scientific. Let me give a simple example to show how this works. We are all familiar with the phenomenon of the loss of a loved person. This loss will make us sad and in some cases such sadness can end up as real melancholia. All this is good folk psychology. When there is melancholia, friends will comment that one might grow out of it and, if one does not grow out of it, friends will say that one is unreasonable because the loss, though an intelligible cause of sadness, did not warrant genuine melancholia. Then comes the question of how great a loss would warrant genuine, permanent melancholia. But with that question mark the folk-psychological reasoning must stop. In order to improve folk psychology it is not enough to extend it.30 It has to be put into a strictly deterministic frame, where one can say that one thing causes another. This is precisely what Freud did when he introduced the postulate of the unconscious. With the help of this postulate he could now explain the melancholia. The argument goes like this: The object loss, say, the death of a mother, is unconsciously transformed into an ego loss and so makes one feel that one is worthless and contemptible. The identification of the ego with the loved object which has been lost is unconscious. The self-depreciation which causes the melancholia is itself caused by the unconscious identification of the ego with the lost ob-

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ject.31 With the help of an unconscious cause, folk-psychological reasoning is now taking place in a strictly deterministic setting. This is the meaning of Freud's contention that he was making folk psychology scientific. The attempt is entirely reasonable and praiseworthy. The problem is whether the postulation of the unconscious is legitimate. The attempt itself was conceived in direct succession to the ideas which had prompted the Project. In his widely read The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, Adolf Griinbaum fails to understand the role which the conception of the Project played in Freud's thinking. He states blandly that Freud abandoned the entire "reductionist program within two years of having enunciated it," and suggests that in abandoning the Project, Freud abjured the very idea of a scientific psychology32 Some traces may have lingered, but basically, Griinbaum maintains, with the abandonment of the Project Freud launched himself into the realm of nonscience. It was perfectly true that Freud, given the paucity of available information about neurons at that time, gave up the attempt to reduce psychology to neurology. I also surmise that Freud gave up the Project because he realized that a description of the dynamics of neurons could not lead to statements in folk psychology. In the Project, "Freud defined affect as a sudden neural discharge resulting from a conjoining of two memory motive structures It is this sudden discharge that... leads to positive or negative feelings (pleasure or anxiety, i.e., unpleasure) consciously perceived: For example, the signal can lead to anxiety. Reality testing (necessitating a double feedback between cortex and ganglia, the mechanism of attention) then ensues and learning can take place."33 This argument is full of slapdash assumptions. Neural discharges are called "affect" as if they had a label glued to them, and feedback between cortex and basal ganglia is identified as "attention," as if the feedback, while it was taking place, kept whispering "attention." No wonder that Freud had second thoughts. But there was no volte face. Freud remained true to the idea that had inspired the attempted reduction, that is, to determinism. He abandoned the ambitious project to reduce psychic events to neuronal events and contented himself with the more modest and manageable undertaking of seeking the causes of psychic events in other psychic events. As argued, he tried to turn folk psychology into a deterministic science rather than to reduce it to neurology The continuing influence of the spirit of determinism which kept informing Freud for the rest of his life is also amply testified by other researchers. The ghost of determinism haunted Freud's writings to the very end.34 My own view of the continuity of Freud's thinking agrees with Thomas Nagel.35 J. Allan Hobson and Griinbaum are alone in believing that Freud really not only abandoned his Project but gave up

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the deterministic materialism that had informed it, and especially Griinbaum is wrong in exaggerating the importance of Freud's abandonment of the Project.36 Being wrong, he must fail to understand the "scientific" reason for the invention of the theory of the unconscious. In order to show how strong the hold of the paradigm which had informed the Project was on Freud's thought throughout his life and how wrong Griinbaum is in thinking that it had lost its hold with the abandonment of the Project, I will quote in full a paragraph from Freud in my own translation. We assume that there is a spatially extended psychic apparatus, which has been purposefully put together by the exigencies of life. This apparatus generates the phenomena of consciousness only under certain conditions and in a special place. This assumption has made it possible for us to erect psychology on a foundation which is very similar to the foundation on which all other natural sciences, e.g. physics, have been erected.37 In addition to the general philosophical reasons which made Freud adhere to the prevailing paradigm of science as the study of causes, there was also social pressure. Freud was already out of step with the prevailing climate because of his interest in sexual phenomena, an interest which had brought him within an inch of intellectual and social ostracism, which could have precluded him from practicing medicine and earning a living, not to mention the difficulties with academic promotion. Had he now pioneered a new paradigm of science, he would have been classed well and truly with astrologers and spiritualists and this would have put a stop to any proper career. These considerations are quite sufficient to explain why his very considerable courage as an explorer did not suffice to make him abandon the prevailing paradigm. We can gauge the weight of these pressures when we recall that Breuer, the man whom Freud acknowledged in his lectures at Clark University in the United States in 1909 as the real author of psychoanalysis, had reacted as follows in 1905 to Ludwig Binswanger's questions of how he (Breuer) regarded Freud: "His look of downright pity and superiority, as well as the wave of his hand, a dismissal in the full sense of the word, left not the slightest doubt that in his opinion Freud had gone scientifically astray to such an extent that he could no longer be taken seriously, and hence it was better not to talk about him."38 Things would have been even worse if Freud had departed from the prevailing paradigm of science as well as from the conventional wisdom about sex. Freud was indeed already treading a dangerous path. Charcot, with whom he had been studying in Paris, was a great deal more cautious.

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Charcot was known to link hysterical symptoms with sexual trauma: "Mais, dans des cas pareils c'est toujours la chose genitale, toujours . . . toujours, toujours."39 But this was in private, at one of his evening receptions and certainly off the record. In public, Charcot relied on visually observable signs.40 When he allowed himself to speculate about the causes of the hysterical seizures which he observed came in a sequence of four distinct phases, he fell back on hereditary dispositions triggered by "dynamic lesions." All in all, Charcot did not swerve from the clinicoanatomic method prescribed by the French medical establishment and explicitly overruled his patients' statements about their actual experiences.41 INCEST AND SEDUCTION There remains then the second question: What made Freud form the idea that the libidinal dynamo, given that it was a bundle of appetitive matter determined by the irresistible desire to satisfy its appetites, was in the first instance, biologically speaking, an incestuous dynamo? Why did he believe that the conative libido of every infant should be directed toward the parent of the opposite sex? I do not believe that it is possible to give a satisfactory single answer to this question. I believe, on the contrary, that there was a convergence of different though related ideas which led Freud to this conclusion. The answer to the question why Freud thought up the notion of the unconscious was concerned with methodological problems and with his conception of what constitutes good science. The answer to this second question is concerned with matters of substance rather than with questions of method. Nevertheless, there is an intimate connection between the two questions. The recourse to the unconscious was forced on Freud by his determination to keep within the ambit of determinism. Once he had discovered that there were symptoms, syndromes, behavior, and pathologies which had no recognizable conscious cause, he was led to postulate the operation of unconscious causes. I suggest that his fascination with the Oedipal wish was, to begin with, due to his discovery that fantasies could have as causal an efficacy as real events. The common view is that Freud fastened on to the Oedipal wish and then constructed explanations. I would like to suggest that we take it the other way round. He was impressed by the role of fantasy (i.e., by the role of events which had never taken place) and then turned his attention to Oedipal wishes because they happened to be around in his psychiatric practice. Nevertheless, I admit, of all examples to choose from there is some explanation needed as to why he chose this particular one. Moreover, this

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particular example eventually assumed an overwhelming importance in his subsequent thinking and tended to crowd out the initial observation which had drawn his attention to it. In his practice, Freud reports, he had heard many stories of how young women claimed to have been seduced by their fathers. Initially, Freud had no reason to doubt these reports and kept wondering how some of these models of bourgeois rectitude, as he and everybody else took the fathers to be, could be guilty of such degenerate behavior. At any rate, he at first attributed the emotional problems of these patients to the fact that they had been seduced by their fathers. Then doubts began to stir. Perhaps, he asked himself, these patients had not been seduced, but had merely wished to be seduced. The wishes could have been repressed—as one might well expect! Repressed, they came back as fantasies that actual seductions had taken place. Eventually Freud worked up to the conclusion that there were no seductions, but repressed wishes or fantasies of seduction. The fact that there were only fantasies was no bar to causality. A fantasy could be a cause of a neurosis as soon as a real event or a memory of a real event. This, I maintain, was his real great discovery. Not the unconscious, not the Oedipal situation, but the recognition that we can suffer equally well from fantasies and from real events: "If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in phantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality"42 Following this train of thought, Freud wrote, "I should myself be glad to know whether the primal scene in my present patient's case was a phantasy or a real experience; but taking other similar cases into account, I must admit that the answer to this question is not in fact a matter of very great importance."43 At a famous and often cited moment in his career, in 1896 he wrote to Fliess and told him that he had abandoned the theory that symptoms were necessarily caused by real seduction.44 The real reason for the abandonment was that Freud had recognized that hysterical or other symptoms could result just as readily from fantasies as from real events. In Freud's view, it was no longer correct to infer from symptoms that real seduction must have taken place. I submit that this step was taken because a number of factors were converging. There was first of all Freud's documented interested in his breakthrough discovery of the causal efficacy of imagined events and mere wishes. This discovery made him prone to reinterpret the stories his patients had been telling him. There was also a certain amount of social pressure combined with a bit of male chauvinism: Respectable bourgeois fathers do not seduce their daughters. Next there was the reflection, at this time probably only half formed, that "seduction" did

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not have to be taken to mean sexual penetration. As infants were polymorphously perverse, they were not genitally oriented. At an early stage, therefore, innocent cuddling could later be remembered as seduction, especially if there was a corresponding wish to be seduced. In his famous letter to Fliess in which he announced his change of mind, he listed three major reasons: First, there was the acknowledgement of therapeutic failure; second, his doubt that adult perversion could not have been all that widespread to account for all cases of hysteria; and third, "there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between the truth and fiction that is cathected with affect."45 It must be immediately obvious to any reader that none of these three reasons were very cogent. If there was therapeutic failure, this could be due to the fact that there was no link between seduction and hysteria (i.e., that the theory was false). Next, there is no telling how widespread adult perversion actually is, and even if it is not widespread the theory that hysteria is due to perverse acts performed by adults on children may be false. Third, the unconscious, alleged to contain no indications of reality, is not a fact of nature, but a concept postulated by Freud and therefore there is no telling whether it does or does not contain "indications of reality" other than those indications which Freud's own postulate has defined to be there. In short, Freud's explicit reasons for the abandonment are neither cogent nor compelling. It is more than a historical curiosity that, four or five years before Freud changed his mind and began to consider that the wish to be seduced can be as traumatic as an actual seduction, Ibsen had considered exactly the same problem in his The Master Builder. The story of the encounter between the middle-aged Solness and the young Hilda Wangel was based on Ibsen's relationship with the eighteen-year-old Emilie Bardach in Gossensass in 1889.46 In the dialogue between Solness and Hilda in the first act, Hilda claims that she had been kissed by Solness when they had first met several years ago. Solness has no memory of the kiss but admits that if she says she had been kissed by him, he must have kissed her. He adds that, if her memory is correct, "I must have wanted to, I must have wished to." When Hilda keeps insisting that it really happened he admits that he must have kissed her and adds with resignation, "Yes, I admit everything you wish." It may well have been her who wished to be kissed and, if he did kiss her, it must have been her wish to be kissed. The dialogue between Solness and Hilda makes it quite clear that the only certainty is her wish to have been kissed. There is no comparable certainty whether there actually had been a kiss and, if there was, who had taken the initiative. Fact or fiction, in the play the consequences of the kiss are devastating for Solness.

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Returning to Freud, we must, given the ambiguity of his overt reasons, ask what other nonexplicit reasons Freud could have had for changing his mind. Why should there be such a wish to be seduced? Here we get help from two different sources. First of all, incestuous desires are widespread. They are not only not far-fetched, but quite understandable because the parents, and siblings for that matter, are usually the only people around. There has to be a lot of education and encouragement to ease the infant or youngster out of family confines and make him or her go out, break with the family, and seek sexual partners elsewhere. Real exogamy, as distinct from the exogamy which merely prescribes that there must be no incest in the literal sense and which sets very strict limits as to how far out anybody may sexually go, is a totally modern, Western phenomenon. Pollution avoidance by staying more or less confined inside a clan or caste is much more natural and much more universal than any desire to seek pollution by intercourse with strangers. Moreover, incestuous desires do not have to be literally or physically sexual. The coziness of the womb, the comfort of a closed family circle, or the care of loving parents are often the very real sources of the ontic security that makes for a successful life.47 Such incestuous desires have to be counteracted by special habits and institutions, lest they are perpetuated beyond a certain stage. Even then, such countervailing habits and institutions are far from permanent and come late in life. Freud eventually formed the opinion that they reassert themselves as a "death instinct," which could be seen as a reactiviation of the initial desire for the womb and of the very natural resistance to splitting off. However this may be, this stay-at-home libido is nothing far-fetched. Jung was very much more sensitive to the wider meanings of incest and the beneficial effects of such incest than Freud ever was. In fact, Jung's last letter to Freud concerned this very point. Freud kept insisting that neurosis is caused by an unresolved incestuous desire for the parent of the opposite sex. Jung agreed that incest wishes are a major factor, but kept suggesting that the boy's desire for the mother was merely a special instance of a wider cosmological phenomenon in which human beings seek to be reunited with the ground of being or the Godhead or the ultimate One, so that the incest taboo is "the symbol or vehicle of a far wider and special meaning which has . . . little to do with real incest."48 Jung put his contrast to Freud very bluntly: "When an insane person says he is the forefather who has been fecundating his daughters for millions of years, such a statement is thoroughly morbid from the medical standpoint. But from the psychological standpoint it is an astounding truth to which the broadest possible consortium gentium bears witness."49 Jung recognized that there is a universal

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human compulsion to seek a home, the familiar, a reabsorption, the womb, and to eliminate individual separateness and distance. For him, the desire to commit incest with the parent of the opposite sex was only a special instance, and a negligible one at that, of this universal compulsion. Freud was unable to look at the matter in the way in which Jung did. The conception Freud was to form of the unconscious as the locus of a repressed experience had an important methodological implication: The incest wish could not be a universal compulsion which all humans had and which transcended family life and its experiences. It had to be a genuine wish that had been repressed by a particular individual. In Freud's view, there was no other way in which the wish could have got into the unconscious. Jung had no such "scientific" scruples. He found no difficulty in postulating a collective unconscious which fed the unconscious of individuals, and he was not bothered by the problem of how anything got into the collective unconscious in the first place. There is also a very revealing anecdote from Freud's early life, when he was in doubt as to what career to choose. It is reported that he made his final decision to take up medicine after attending a lecture on Goethe. Freud reports this both in his The Interpretation of Dreams of 1900 and in his Autobiography of 1925. During the lecture he was told of Goethe's "dithyrambic essay [which] is a romantic picture of Nature as a bountiful mother who allows her favourite children the privilege to explore her secrets."50 The story is well known and almost all biographers have made some comment on it including the suggestion that the essay in question was not really by Goethe. But I have never seen the obvious comment: Freud was prompted by Goethe's essay to explore Mother Nature. When he had explored it, he found that men want to explore their mother to make her reveal her "secrets" to them. That is, he discovered that boys have Oedipal desires. There is here a perfect homology between the quest and the findings! In almost all myths of quest there is a similar homology, for it turns out that the meaning of the myth of quest is not that it is a search for immortality, riches, or a woman, let alone the Holy Grail, but that it is a quest for meaning. However this may be, I submit that Freud was emotionally predisposed to perceive Oedipal desires and to make the discovery of those desires the lynch pin of his psychology. It needed therefore only a small push, when he thought of all those respectable fathers accused of seducing their daughters, to make him think that the truth was the other way around: The daughters wished to be seduced by their fathers. Only a little push was needed because the turn around also fitted in with his recognition that one can be traumatized and neurotically disturbed by events which have never taken place but which one merely

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wished to have taken place, especially when that wish had to be repressed. And so it was that Freud summed it up in his Complete Introductory Lectures of Psychoanalysis of 1933: "Almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their fathers. I was driven to recognise in the end that those reports were untrue and so came to understand that the hysterical symptoms were derived from fantasy and not from real occurrences."51 The abandonment of the initial seduction theory and its replacement by his theory of infantile Oedipal desires was the major crisis in the development of Freud's thought: "Accordingly," the letter of September 21,1897 to Fliess ends, "there would remain the solution that the sexual fantasy invariably seizes upon the theme of the parent."52 In 1984, J. M. Masson published a seemingly sensational book in which he claimed that Freud had changed his mind because he was not man enough to face the consequences of these improper revelations.53 The "evidence," Masson asserted, would have compelled him to continue with the theory that actual seduction had taken place. I would, first of all, agree with Griinbaum that any evidence for the pathogenic character of actual seductions is every inch as tricky as any evidence for the pathogenic character of imagined seductions.54 So, from the point of view of "science," Masson's attempt to be sensational by charging Freud with dishonesty and cowardice is neither here nor there. More simple than Freud, Masson maintains that imaginary events cannot have real effects. Therefore, he continues, it is obviously absurd and a sign of dishonesty to claim that they have effects. Masson completely misses the point with his contention that if the seductions have effects, they cannot have been imaginary. Freud's real courage was displayed when he started to envisage the possibility that imagined events could be as causally effective as real ones and Freud, in abandoning the seduction theory and replacing it by the theory of imagined or wished seductions, showed exemplary intellectual courage—even though he shrank, as we have seen, from taking the next step as well, which would have been the abandonment of his strict deterministic paradigm. The straight point is that by this time Freud had become preoccupied and intrigued by the idea that wishes can produce fantasies which have real consequences, even though they are fantasies. Their power to do so comes from the fact that the original wish has been repressed into the unconscious and is acting from there, unbeknownst to its victim. Freud, in short, abandoned his original seduction theory because he had become far too interested in his psychological discovery of the causal efficacy of fantasy to wonder precisely how many of these women patients had been actually seduced and precisely how many only imagined that they had been seduced. He was too fascinated by the power

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of repressed wishes to worry about the morals of his patients' parents. As Freud himself put it in his History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement of 1914, "If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in fantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality"55 And here is a summary comment: "Freud has moved from a conviction of the ontogenetic reality of primal scenes to indifference about whether they are reality or fantasy"56 Or listen again to Freud's own words in his An Autobiographical Study: "The neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful fantasies, and that, as far as the neurosis was concerned, psychical reality was of more importance than material reality"57 Freud, in short, discovered that there was no difference between the effects of an act that took place and the effects of an act that was imagined: "Up to the present we have not succeeded in pointing to any difference in the consequences whether phantasy or reality has had a greater share in these events in childhood."58 He then proceeded to ascribe what might look like inevitable confusion, to the operation of retrospective fantasy (Zuriickphantasie).59 He wrote to Fliess on December 6,1886 that he had come to the conclusion that the material present in the form of memory traces is subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances; that is, to retranscription (Umschrift).60 The phenomenon of retrospective fantasy which alters memories every time one looks back and so wipes out the rigid distinction between the effects of imagined events and the effects of events which have really taken place is not just a Freudian fancy. Much modern research into the making of memory—unconnected with Freudian theory or any other kind of psychoanalysis—has borne out that such retrospective changes in memory actually occur and are to be expected. An event laid down in memory is not laid down as a "simple, unitary experience" for the person concerned. It is laid down in bits and pieces in different parts of the nervous system according to the way it is categorized.61 But categorizations such as color, place, degrees of apprehension, shape, taste, and the like are not absolute: "The brain holds . . . a record of the neuronal activity that takes place in the sensory and motor cortices during interaction with a given object. . . [but] these processes . . . occur in separate functional regions."62 Every time these memory traces are accessed, the categorization changes because of the changed interests and changed focus of the accessor. So, the various parts into which the initial experience was split and which are laid down in different parts of the nervous system are reassembled in different and novel ways; and not all parts are reassembled or reassembled

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in the same way every time the person is looking back. This mechanism not only explains the operation of retrospective fantasy, but shows that we must actually expect to remember things differently every time we look back. Looking back, something that was a fantasy could reappear as a real event or the other way around. The meaning of an event can be changed in the light of a later event, or the other way around. Masson, in other words, missed Freud's point, which was precisely that what we remember or can be made to recall is likely to vary with the time and the occasion on which we remember or recall. Masson missed this all-important point because he is addicted to the belief that only events which really happened can have traumatic effects.63 Masson's claim that Freud rejected the theory that hysteria was caused by childhood seduction because he did not have the courage of his own convictions and wanted to suppress evidence damaging to members of his own class is indeed absurd. Freud knew perfectly well from Charcot's case histories, if from nowhere else, that seductions occurred.64 Moreover, there are documented cases among Freud's own patients that women had been victims of their fathers' sexual behavior.65 There was no way that Freud could have deluded himself that these and similar stories were fantasies. What he gave up was not the belief that seductions occurred, but the belief that they and they alone were the causes of hysterical symptoms. He substituted instead the theory that hysterical symptoms could also be caused by fictitious traumas.66 When, at a meeting of the Vienna Society of Psychiatry and Neurology, KrafftEbing oiPsychopathologia Sexualis fame commented on May 2,1896 that "this sounds like a scientific fairy-tale," he was referring to the proposed link hetweenfantasized sex and hysteria, not to the link between sex and hysteria.67 If anything, Masson is arguing against Jones's interpretation of the reason why Freud abandoned the monocausal explanation of hysteria. For Jones's story could indeed be read to mean that the change of theory and the abandonment of the monocausal theory amounted to a rejection of the belief that hysterical symptoms could be caused by actual seductions. It was Jones who stressed Freud's "astonishment at being asked to believe that all his patients' fathers were given to sexual perversions."68 It is hard to know whether Jones intended to create this impression or whether he did so inadvertently. Whichever way, whatever justification there is for Masson's claim that Freud swept actual seductions under the carpet or hoped to keep them in a closet, it must be laid at the door of Jones, not at the door of Freud. Freud might have been astonished, but at the center of his change of theory there stood his realization that fantasy can be as causally potent as reality, not a dishonest determination to deny that seductions occur. However, it has to

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be admitted that when Freud gave up his monocausal explanation of hysterical symptoms he replaced it by a bicausal explanation when he ought to have replaced it by a multicausal explanation. But this possibility was not open to him. Multicausal explanations are incompatible with grand theory, and it was grand theory he was after. Since the appearance of Masson's "revelations," there has yet been another development which goes far beyond Masson's allegations of dishonesty and further obfuscates the issue by increasing the misunderstanding of Freud's scientistic self-misunderstanding. If Oedipally incestuous wishes are unconscious, as Freud claimed, one could not expect them to emerge spontaneously from the reports of the people who had them or who had had them. This much follows from the concept of "unconscious." This means that it has to be suggested to people that they have these wishes and that such suggestion has to come from the method of free association or psychoanalysis which Freud was to develop. The psychologist, in other words, had to have a strong input. The necessity for that input has made some eager critics claim that Freud's patients not only were not seduced but did not even claim to have been seduced, but that the entire idea that they had been or wished to have been was put to them by Freud himself. "A consideration of all the evidence," writes Allen Esterson, a professional mathematician, "then points to the conclusion that Freud's early patients, in general, did not recount stories of infantile seductions... [but that these stories] were foisted on them."69 Reading Esterson, one gets the impression that there is no evidence to this effect at all. Esterson simply concludes from the fact that the patients, since the Oedipal wish or memory was unconscious, had to be introduced to the idea by somebody that the idea was "foisted" on them. I will discuss the necessity of the technique of such foisting and Freud's open admission of such foisting in Chapter 5. For the time being, I can only say that this fact is not "evidence" that there were no Oedipal wishes. It is merely evidence of the thorny nature of the unconscious and the tricky methods that have to be deployed in order to gain access to it (i.e., access to something to which one cannot have access). In this area mathematical reasoning does not help, as is shown by Esterson's own remark that there has been, after the abandonment of the seduction theory, a "dearth of reports."70 If Esterson had read the daily papers more carefully, he would have realized that there is anything but a "dearth" of such reports. On the contrary, in the 1980s and 1990s we are being flooded by such reports. Freud or no Freud, whatever one thinks of Freud's conclusions and his consequent strategies, Esterson is simply wrong in claiming that there is a dearth of such reports. It is a sad comment on human rationality that Esterson is now

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being cited as conclusive evidence by Frederick Crews, who is looking, for reasons better known to himself than to me, for any stick he can find to beat Freud with.71 Freud's discovery that fantasies can be as powerful as realities is entirely in conformity with the view of the composite nature of consciousness as proposed in Chapter 1. This discovery obliged Freud, determined as he was to remain with the materialistic and deterministic framework of what he thought was good science, to postulate that some wishes had been repressed and were causally operating from the unconscious. Before going into the wisdom of such a postulation, let me state that on the face of it this discovery, without the postulate, is an unwitting acknowledgement that states of mind have to be constructed and are not found ready made. Above all, since the ontological status (a wish, a real experience, a memory of a real experience, a repressed wish, a repressed memory, etc.) of what is in the mind is not itself part of the information contained in the neuronal events (inchoate buzzes, moods, somatic markers, etc.) but something that is verbally constructed and imputed to them, Freud's discovery bears out what I have argued in Chapter 1 to be the real condition of states of consciousness. If the theory about the indeterminate and indeterminable relations between reality and neurons and between neurons and labelled states of mind is correct, then Freud's discovery that real events can be as causally efficacious as imagined ones is exactly what one would expect. There is a lot of leeway, looseness, and give and take in the links of reality to neurons and of neurons to labelled states of mind. This leeway not only permits but actually encourages the indiscriminate formation of labels, but also prevents the elimination of labels that are alleged not to fit the somatic markers which have to intervene between real events and labelled states of mind. For there is nothing or nothing much in the neurons themselves to dictate the exclusion of any label. In fact, the notion that some labels fit more than others and are therefore the correct labels, makes no sense at all. Freud's discovery that reality and fantasy can be equally efficacious, to make a long story short, fits the concluding formula of Chapter 1: W > N - > SM < L which describes a process of cognition in which there is no one-to-one correspondence between the events in the real world which stimulate our neuronal circuits and the eloquent language we use to define our states of mind. On the contrary, the real world, though it sets neuronal circuits and the somatic markers the circuits cause and of which we are dimly aware in motion, is treated selectively by the neuronal circuits.

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What comes in is more than the neurons register. At the other end, the eloquence we employ to interpret the somatic markers (our inner, subjective feels) adds a lot of information. By the time we confront the final outcome on the right with the initial input on the left, there is a large discrepancy so that we can neither tell what came in by looking at what came out nor predict what will come out by looking at what came in. Freud's observation that states of mind can be defined by what really happened as soon as by what our fantasy imagines to have happened is a very direct and simple way of summing up the peculiarities of these relationships between world, neurons, somatic markers, and conscious states of mind. This observation—and this cannot be stressed too strongly—is out of step with what nineteenth-century materialistic positivists took to be the hallmark of science: causal determinacy Because of his commitment to what was, in his days, to be understood as science, Freud could not put it in these terms and, instead, continued to think of causal determinacy and therefore couched his discovery in the old-fashioned terminology necessitated by the then prevailing scientific paradigm that every event must have a determinable cause. This adherence pushed him into postulating the causal efficacy of the unconscious. With this postulate, Freud, in spite of his discovery that fiction and fact can be causally equally efficacious, was able to keep everything within the conceptual framework of causality. His conclusion that a fantasy is caused by a repressed wish comes very close to what I would describe as a realistic psychology (i.e., a realistic science of states of mind), in which there are first inchoate events and, second, a manufacture of eloquent descriptions which do not correspond to those inchoate events but only interpret them hypothetically This, and nothing less than this, is the real meaning of his old-fashioned terminology, in which one thing causes another; that is, in which a wish which is illicit is censored and, as a result, repressed. Dormant but active, it operates from the unconscious to produce a symptom which is incapable of being reduced in one-to-one correspondence to the neuronal events it is constructed to refer to. THE SCIENTIFIC QUANDARY Though the net effect of this old-fashioned deterministic terminology is compatible with the understanding of the so called science of the mind outlined in Chapter 1, Freud used a terminology which is misleading and which loaded the dice against him. The first philosopher to fasten on these misleading implications was Karl Popper. In Popper's view, Freud's strategy to postulate that there are unconscious causes when no conscious ones are detectable cannot stand up to sci-

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entific scrutiny72 Popper did not even concede, though this is a different matter, that the Freudian postulate that some causes are unconscious was conceived for the best of reasons; that is, in order to salvage psychology, given that facts and fictions can be equally causally efficacious, for what the nineteenth century understood as the hallmark of science: determinism. Popper could not concede such saving grace because, above all, he himself had undermined the viability of that nineteenth-century conception of what constitutes good science. Popper pointed out that by his new understanding of what makes good science, the very notion of the unconscious has to be rejected, even as we reject alchemy and astrology which also operate through hidden causes. The quality of science, he argued against the old nineteenthcentury view, does not depend on one's ability to show that every occurrence is determined. It stands and falls instead by the exclusion of all statements which are not potentially falsifiable. All statements which lay claim to being scientific must be couched in such a way that one can clearly see the conditions under which they would be false. Only if those conditions are stated clearly and unequivocally can a statement be considered to be scientific (i.e., to have empirical import). This formulation of what is and of what is not science is very different from the old alleged "received view," according to which a statement is scientific if it can be reduced to single and particular observational statements. But—and this is completely damaging to Freud's postulation of the unconscious—as soon as the unconscious is allowed to operate as a cause, any statement that implies such unconscious determinism is, by definition, unfalsifiable. Freudians are forced by their central postulate to admit that one cannot specify experimental conditions under which anything they say would be false. The postulate implies that there cannot be such conditions, because as soon as a statement about the cause of one's state of mind is falsified, the postulate requires that instead of dismissing the statement as false one insist that the real cause is so hidden (i.e., unconscious) that it has not yet been found.73 All recourse to a hidden or unconscious cause makes any statement about causes unfalsifiable. The real quandary derives from the fact that Freud himself would not have been worried by Popper's objection. For in his view what made a theory or statement scientific was not its potential falsifiability, but its ability to show that everything was determined by a cause. Let us look at a few examples to show that, from a Popperian view, theories which use unconscious causation could not be scientific. Adler claims that people act from feelings of inferiority, and Freud claimed that we act from our Oedipus complex, repressed or sublimated.74 Given the postulate that the motives of actions can be unconscious, there is

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no way in which one can decide who is right and who is wrong. Popper wrote, I may illustrate this by two very different examples of human behavior: that of a man who pushes a child into the water with the intention of drowning it; and that of a man who sacrifices his life in an attempt to save the child. According to Freud the first man suffered from repression (say, of some component of his Oedipus complex), while the second man had achieved sublimation. According to Adler the first man suffered from feelings of inferiority (producing perhaps the need to prove himself that he dares to commit some crime), and so did the second man (whose need was to prove to himself that he dared to rescue the child).75 To carry the analysis of the example further: If the first man drowns the child, this is because the Oedipus complex is unresolved; if he saves the child, this is because the Oedipus complex has been resolved. The theory that we all are driven by the Oedipus complex is unfalsifiable. As a matter of interest, Popper's objection was anticipated by both William James and Titchener. It was also anticipated by Karl Kraus as early as 1908. Kraus pointed out that it is impossible, once the postulate is introduced, to demonstrate that any psychoanalytical statement is false, and added that for this reason all psychoanalysis was "base rhetoric."76 With the postulation that there is an unconscious, they all said, we enter the realm of fiction. Unlike Kraus, James expressed himself more cautiously. He appreciated the phenomenon Freud was thinking about and tried to understand what Freud was getting at. He hoped that a vaguer term for "unconscious" might be found. Unlike Popper, who ought to have hesitated about Freud as much as he hesitated about quantum mechanics, James really kept wondering.77 Freud's psychology, in Popper's view, fails to be a science because with the postulation of the unconscious it makes itself immune against all falsification. It may be interesting, but cannot be more so than alchemy or astrology. A statement is a scientific statement about reality, as opposed to a superstitious statement, if it takes a risk. The risk consists in the possibility that it might be false. Popper contrasts Freud with Einstein. Einstein's theory about the curvature of space took a risk. It made a prediction and if that prediction had been falsified by Eddington's famous expedition, the theory would have had to be abandoned. Freud's predictions took no risk at all. If the findings were as predicted, well and good. If they were not, Freud would say that there had been insufficient analysis of the unconscious and that further analysis would yield a confirmation. If further analysis did not, then this was proof that the unconscious had not yet been tapped and that there would have to be yet further analysis.

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The impeccability of Popper's criticism of Freud is absolute and final. It needs very little reflection to prove that it is so. Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham are true Popperians when they argue that the belief that there can be repression into the unconscious has the same standing as belief in God.78 There are innumerable instances in Freud's writings which demonstrate that his theories about states of mind are unfalsifiable. I mention just one random example. When Ernest Jones toyed tentatively with the views of Melanie Klein, Freud wrote that he ought to be further psychoanalyzed. Psychoanalysis would then reveal the unconscious reason he had for thinking that Melanie Klein might be right.79 When Jones wrote back to say that he had probed but not discovered that "reason," Freud replied that his failure to do so was obvious proof that he had not been psychoanalyzed enough. "You," Freud wrote, "[are] accusing Anna [Freud] of not having been analysed deeply enough. . . . I had to point out to you that such criticism is . . . impermissible. Is anyone actually analysed enough? I can assure you that Anna has been analysed longer and more thoroughly than, for example, yourself."80 Or look at how Freud put it on another occasion: They keep on maintaining that nothing has occurred to them. We must not believe what they say, we must always assume, and tell them, too, that they have kept something back. . . . We must insist on this, we must repeat the pressure and represent ourselves as infallible, till at last we are told something. . . . In all such cases I remain unshakeably firm. I . . . explain to the patients that [these distinctions] are only forms of their resistance and pretexts raised by them against reproducing this particular memory, which we must recognise in spite of all this.81

In short, if there are unconscious determinants, no falsification is acceptable. For there could yet be further, even more unconscious determinants, and so forth, ad infinitum. If we are motivated by unconscious wishes, there can never be a falsification of anything. What is more, once the unconscious is postulated, there can be no controlled experiment and no laboratory evidence either way. It is remarkable how, on many occasions, Freud was endlessly inventive in his ability to establish immunity from falsification. For example, when it turned out that Dora's throat disorder did not invariably coincide with the absence of the man she loved, Freud commented that "it became necessary [for her] to obscure the coincidence between her attacks of illness and the absence of the man she secretly loved, lest its regularity should betray her secret."82 It is a peculiarly un-Popperian irony that in spite of this fact researchers have tried to discover "empirical" data for or against the theory of the unconscious.83 If the possibility of unconscious motivation is entertained, there is no

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rock bottom and no real knowing. The weird thing is that in spite of the fact that reasoning about unconscious motives cannot aspire to lead to knowledge of what is going on, it can make perfect sense. "To make good sense" and "to know" are not always the same thing. This matter will be explored in Chapter 5. This avoidance of falsification by the postulation of an unconscious determinant is very different from the possible avoidance of falsification by the construction of an ad hoc hypothesis which Popper argued to be admissible. The avoidance of falsification by an ad hoc hypothesis is merely a strategic move, because the ad hoc hypothesis, to be scientifically viable, would have to be itself falsifiable. The trouble with an avoidance of falsification by the postulation of an unconscious determinant is different. It leads to an infinite regress and therefore makes falsification in principle, rather than in practice, impossible. If falisifiability is the mark of science and distinguishes science from nonscience, Freud's psychology is not a science. Unlike Popper, Adolf Griinbaum, in his The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, takes it that some Freudian theories have empirical content and are as falsifiable as ordinary theories.84 His main example is Freud's theory that male paranoia is caused by repressed male homosexuality85 Griinbaum takes it that with the decline of the taboo on male homosexuality in modern Western societies, one must expect a decrease in the incidence of male paranoia.86 If there is not, the theory is false. Freud's detailed pathogenesis of paranoia indeed makes the following prediction possible: "A significant decline in the social sanctions against atypical sexual orientation should issue in a marked decrease in the incidence of paranoia."87 A closer look at Grunbaum's contention that we are here dealing with a genuinely empirical theory will show that the contention is wrong. No matter what contemporary findings about the incidence of paranoia in our contemporary tolerant society reveal, Freud could still be right. All one needs to do to salvage Freud's theory is the reminder that what passes for tolerance is really the result of the repression of intolerance and that the taboo on homosexuality in contemporary society has not disappeared but has been repressed. Homosexuals are therefore still victims of resentment which they sense even though it now has been repressed and is acting causally from the unconscious. Therefore, any statistical finding that in spite of increased tolerance the amount of paranoia is as great as ever does not prove Freud's theory of the etiology of paranoia wrong. On the contrary, a true Freudian would claim that the present persistence of paranoia in spite of increased overt tolerance of homosexuality proves Freud doubly right. Resentment of homosexuality cannot go away. It can only be repressed and

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the continued incidence of paranoia proves how right Freud was in thinking that repressed resentment can have seriously real consequences. Griinbaum's contention, in other words, is wrong and Popper is right. If one can have recourse to the unconscious, a theory ceases to be falsifiable. In spite of the inevitable conclusion that the Freudian theory about paranoia and homosexuality is, in principle, not falsifiable, Mario Bunge, following Griinbaum, takes it to be established that there are at least some testable components in psychoanalytic theory 88 Like Griinbaum, Bunge underrates and even ignores the enormity of the concept of the unconscious. He cites Griinbaum as his authority, unaware that Griinbaum's example is wrong. Or take another of Griinbaum's examples alleged to show that Freud's theories have empirical content. Psychoanalysis hypothesizes that children are ambivalent in their attitude to their parents but, at any one time, either their hostility or their affection will be more unconscious than the other. Griinbaum suggests that this hypothesis is testable and, if you wish, falsifiable: If there were no "such mixed behavioral orientation at all, the ascription of ambivalence would be discontinued." 89 1 am afraid that Griinbaum's confidence is not justified. A genuine psychoanalyst would not take the absence of mixed behavioral orientation as a falsification of the hypothesis. He would, on the contrary, be bound to argue that since there is no mixed behavioral orientation, either the hostility or the affection must have been successfully repressed. If one considers these examples, one can see that Griinbaum not only misunderstands Popper but consistently underestimates the resourcefulness of the concept of repression in providing strategies for the evasion of falsification. The question of empirical verification has been brought up by both supporters and critics. Strachey and Eissler, as well as Gay, claim that Freud's theories stand upon the case histories (i.e., on the empirical evidence Freud provided).90 And Freud himself claimed that there is "a broad basis of our observations, the repetition of similar impressions from the most varied spheres or mental life" which support his conclusion that repression into the unconscious takes place.91 Crews maintains that one can expose the "empirical groundlessness of psychoanalysis."92 Between these two opposing views, Edelson argues that it is true that so far these theories are only based on "enumerative induction which always confirms what Freud said by the mere accumulation of confirmations."93 He pleads that Freudian theory would become more credible if it were exposed to "eliminative induction," that is, to the collection of nonconfirming evidence so that one can examine whether it stands up to it or falls. Edelson is right about the uselessness of enumerative induction, but wrong in thinking that any

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comparison with nonconfirming evidence would make any difference. For as soon as nonconfirming evidence is provided, be it from the testimony of the analysand or be it from the testimony of the analyzer, we can hear as sure as not Freud's avuncular admonition that whoever produces nonconfirming testimony has not been sufficiently analyzed. What is more, Freud's admonition would be correct, for once the phenomenon of repression and the postulate that what is repressed resides in the unconscious and acts from there is accepted, one must indeed continue to suspect that any nonconfirming evidence results from resistance and would, given further probing into the depths of the unconscious, disappear or reveal itself to be nothing but disguised confirming evidence. The point is that, given the postulate of the unconscious which allows a never-ending regress into further and further analysis, empirical evidence, confirming or nonconfirming, is irrelevant. The postulate preempts all recourse to empirical evidence: Freud may have claimed to be an inductivist, Griinbaum may support this claim, Crews may insist that empirical evidence has disproved Freud's theories, and people may continue the search by Fisher and Greenberg for confirmations.94 The pious belief that empirical research will settle the matter was reiterated by A. M. Cooper in 1984.95 However, there is no need to examine these claims and counterclaims, for empirical evidence becomes irrelevant once the postulate is accepted. The desire to cite empirical evidence was strong and irresistible in the nineteenth century. The story of Darwin is well known. Though he had not proceeded by empirical induction, he later claimed in his Autobiography that he had.96 But Freud's postulate was different in principle from the theory of evolution by natural selection. The latter is open to falsification and, what is more, has produced continuously progressive research programs. 97 Freud's postulate is, in principle, not open to falsification. Before Popper, Edward Glover admitted guilelessly that if falsifications are rated, as they must be if the postulate is accepted, as "resistances .. . there is a tendency . . . to perpetuate error."98 Let us return to Griinbaum's book, which is really, though claiming to be a criticism of Freud, an attack on Popper. His attempt to show that some of Freud's theories have empirical content because they are falsifiable is, if anything, a defense and not a criticism of Freud. For that matter, he is also much more concerned with a refutation of Habermas's and Ricoeur's criticisms of Freud than with Freud himself. Reading Griinbaum's book, one cannot help thinking that he is writing like a lapsed Catholic who cannot bear it when other people criticize the Pope. His running battle against Popper occupies one-tenth of the entire book. It is worth examining Griinbaum's real, not all that

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hidden, agenda. Griinbaum is not all that concerned with Freud, but very much concerned with Popper's well known famous refutation of the belief that induction is a valid method to arrive at the truth.99 It is perfectly true that Popper, in Conjectures and Refutations, added almost as an aside that the unfalsifiability of Freudian theories, due to the postulate of the unconscious, made them an inductivist's dream, for whatever testing is being done, the results always increase the size of the heap of confirming instances.100 For given that unfalsifiability all findings were always true ex officio and one could therefore claim, if one is an inductivist, that Freudian theories are true because they are so well confirmed. The claim was ironic, because it led to the view that Freudian theories are the most perfect theories in the world. Even Einstein's theories, let alone Newton's, have their difficulties. Freud's theories could have none! Popper used this argument to cast yet another stone at inductivism, but it was not his main reason for rejecting inductivism, reasons which are very different from these ironic remarks about Freud. The weighty reasons are contained in his Logik der Forschung of 1934.101 Griinbaum does not refer to Popper's main work and argument but fastens on the Popperian aside from Conjectures and Refutations and forgets its irony in order to show that Popper's refutation of inductivism is a mistake.102 Griinbaum, in other words, wants to defend inductivism, not to criticize Freud. This is clearly proved by this argument: "Let me say here, however, that if Popper's case of the drowning child is to have any cogency at all, he would need to show that Freud's theory grants unrestricted license to postulate at will whatever potentially explanatory initial conditions we may fancy as motivation of dispositions of a given person in particular external circumstances." 103 Griinbaum, as we have seen in the case of homosexuality and paranoia, is wrongly of the opinion that Freudian theory does not grant such license. It does grant such license, precisely because of the postulation that a motive or intention alleged to be a causal factor, even though not apparent, could be unconscious. THE CIRCULARITY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL REASONING Having disposed of the argument Griinbaum takes such pains to advance against Popper, let us next take a look at the argument Griinbaum advances against Freud. Griinbaum has "discovered" a very obvious circularity in Freud's contention that his theories are correct. Freud maintains that patients cannot conquer their hysterical symptoms without insight into their causes. But since these causes are unconscious, they have to be unlocked and made conscious. Since they are unconscious, there is no direct way of making them conscious. The

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psychoanalyst has to assume the lead. Now, if the symptoms disappear and the therapy is successful, Freud took it that his theory that the symptoms had been caused by repressed experiences or wishes must be true. The therapist's conjectures of what had been repressed tallies with what had been in the unconscious. For Freud, the patient becomes "a supporter of some particular theory.... In this respect the patient is behaving like anyone else—like a pupil—but this only affects his intelligence, not his illness. After all, his conflicts will only be successfully solved if the anticipatory ideas he is given tally with what is real in him. Whatever in the doctor's conjectures is inaccurate drops out in the course of the argument."104 Griinbaum argues that this procedure shows that the entire claim that the symptoms were caused by unconscious wishes is circular. The symptoms could easily have disappeared, Griinbaum argues, for different reasons. Griinbaum's diagnosis of circularity is entirely correct. But, as I will show in Chapter 5, it proves nothing at all. The manufacture of eloquence is therapeutic because it provides a framework in which to place the inchoate buzzings and moods caused by neurons. Once a verbal statement is manufactured, the disorienting force of those buzzes is put into a straitjacket and, inside a constructed straitjacket, they become intelligible and cease to be so threatening. This does not prove that Freud's own account of the reasons why the manufacture of eloquence is therapeutic is correct. But it proves—and this is entirely compatible with the view of psychology presented in Chapter 1—that the mere manufacture of eloquence helps. I will return to this question at length in Chapter 5. Griinbaum's diagnosis of circularity is damaging only to Freud's own account of how the manufacture works, but it is precisely what one must expect from all psychology. If psychology is a manufacture of eloquence, then it does not matter who is doing the manufacturing— the doctor or the patient himself or herself. What matters is that there is manufacture and nothing but manufacture. Freud was merely wrong in thinking that the manufactured part tallies with "what is real in the patient." According to the argument of Chapter 1, there is nothing specific that is "real in him"; and therefore there is only conjecture and interpretation, be it by a doctor, a patient, or anybody else. This is true of all psychology and not, as Griinbaum avers, only of Freudian psychology. Try it on Jane Austen's and Stendhal's manufacture of eloquence. Stendhal's hero, Julien Sorel, constructs his impulses as Napoleon would have constructed them. His image of Napoleon tallies with the way he approaches women, not because there is something real in him which happens to tally with the Napoleonic image, but because whatever is in him is constructed in the image of Napoleon. It tallies because it is made to do so. Julien Sorel's neurons and

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their somatic markers do not carry sufficient information to lead to any specific manufacture or rule out any specific manufacture that might be used to interpret them. The circularity is perfect and one does not need Freud to see it. I would challenge Griinbaum to manufacture any eloquence about anybody's psyche without such circularity The things both Popper and Griinbaum claim to be unscientific and therefore wrong in Freud are precisely the things which are "unscientific" in psychology as such. The charge of epistemological contamination of all evidence in Freudian psychology must stand, but—and this is a point Griinbaum is not aware of—it must stand for all psychology, Freudian or non-Freudian. Our psyche is not a subject matter about which we can make statements which are true or false according to whether they correspond to the psyche. Consider this example: A few years ago, it was alleged in an Italian court by a psychologist for the defense that an adolescent who had murdered his father in order to inherit the family fortune was not "thinking" of the father when he knifed him but was in reality "thinking" that he was valiantly struggling against a satanic force and defending the purity of his country. There is no way in which one could settle the truth of this allegation. The statement, like its denial, does not correspond to anything. It is a verbal construction of a neuronally induced mood which has next to no color and very little specific quality The verbal construction is an interpretation, not a description of that buzzing mood. Therefore, there can be no telling whether that construction is a lie, an excuse, or a sincerely held construction, for there is nothing much there to compare it to. The most one might expect is that one might listen to the adolescent's own construction. The adolescent's testimony about it cannot make any difference, because his own testimony would be nothing but his construction. Since he has nothing but his own neurons to go by, he is almost as much at sea as anybody else. If he supports the statement, he could be suspected by the prosecution of having repressed what he truly thought; if he disagrees with it, the defense could argue that he was repressing what he truly thought. Given the fact that eloquence about thoughts has to be manufactured and cannot represent what is really thought let alone correspond to it because nothing much in particular is being thought, one is left with a confrontation of two manufactured articles and a battle of wills which cannot be resolved one way or the other by an appeal to evidence or reality. I will turn to a discussion of such a battle of wills and its chances of resolution in Chapter 5. The psyche is silent and unworded and no statement can correspond to it. Our psyche needs construction and all eloquence about it has to be manufactured, not found. Psychology therefore must, in principle,

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differ from all other sciences which study what is given, even though they may define the shape of their subject matter by the methods used to study it. Epistemological contamination of the evidence may not be entirely unknown in the other sciences, but in psychology the evidence is manufactured and contamination is therefore of the essence. Both Popper and Griinbaum chose to ignore this. Freud's difficulties arose from the fact that he was torn. On one side there was his determination to be scientific, which means that his psychological statements would have to be verifiable by clinical evidence. On the other side there was his insight that states of mind are different from the facts of nature. But he could not get himself to admit that all eloquence about the psyche is a manufactured article. Though he himself engaged in very subtle manufacture, he kept claiming that it was merely descriptive of what was really going on inside people's minds. If a description could not be verified by the patient's avowal, this did not prove that the description was mistaken, but that the description described something which had become repressed into the unconscious of the patient. Looking at this situation realistically, one can recognize that he was much less guided by or dependent on clinical evidence than he claimed. But critics who fail to understand the horns of Freud's dilemma are now having a field day in showing that the "bulk of his 'findings' are essentially conjectural and that the clinical evidence for them . . . [is] virtually nonexistent."105 These critics ought to have had a better look at the nature of states of mind and the need for the manufacture of eloquence and sought to come to terms with the dicey nature of psychology, rather than attack Freud. Freud remained somehow suspended between the horns of his own dilemma, a determination to remain in the ambit of what he thought was science and his subtle understanding of the manufacture of eloquence, a manufacture which he did not dare to admit to. So he claimed more clinical evidence than there was and than there could be and his critics, instead of understanding the need for the manufacture of eloquence, take him at his own word only to demonstrate that the clinical evidence is false. But the real trouble lies in the nature of psychology, not in Freud. If this were realized and recognized, twothirds of today's Freud industry would become redundant. However, we cannot do without psychology. Our sense of identity as well as our ability to relate to other people depends entirely on our ability to manufacture enough eloquence to get by. I therefore propose to turn away from the question whether Freud's psychology measures up to the standard of a science, because no psychology does or can, and turn instead to the question of whether Freud's psychology contains concepts which are untenable even by the standards of psychology itself.

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If there are legitimate doubts about Griinbaum's view that some Freudian theories are empirical and even more telling doubts about his argument that Freudian psychoanalytical therapy is a sham because it is circular—doubts which center on the recognition that all psychological thinking has to be circular but that we have to engage in it all the same—one must confess to equally legitimate doubts about Popper's argument. Although Popper's argument about falsification is consistent and logically impeccable, one ought to have serious doubts about Popper's criterion of falsifiability when applied to psychology. Popper made countless efforts and devoted endless thought on how to account for quantum mechanics in terms other than the Copenhagen interpretation which, he found, made quantum mechanics too subjectivistic. It is conceivable that he might have said that the Copenhagen interpretation must stand and that, as it stands, quantum mechanics is not scientific because it commits us to a form of idealism and obliges us to believe that at least some parts of nature have no really objective existence. He did not say this, and questioned the Copenhagen interpretation instead. When it came to psychology, he said from the outset that the notion of repression and of the unconscious is an essential part of depth psychology and that, therefore, depth psychology is not scientific. It is conceivable that he could have argued that the notion of repression is as inadmissible as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and taken it from there and argued that there must be a different kind of depth psychology just as there can be a quantum mechanics without the Copenhagen interpretation. But, unlike quantum mechanics, psychology in general and Freud in particular received short shrift. If it could not live up to the Popperian criterion of science, it had to be consigned to the realm of superstition. Such double-standard treatment was due to Popper's dislike of subjective states of mind. He admitted their importance and suggested that they formed a separate world, his "World 2." But in that world there were entities that served as mediators or bridges between the World 1 of real hard realities and the World 3, the world of abstract theories and hypotheses, like a semi-Platonic realm of forms, about the realities of World 1. In other words, their presence was a necessity required to link World 1 with World 3. This fact would not necessarily preclude a science of psychology about World 2, but it somehow diminished both urgency and respect for it. Science aimed at enlarging World 3 and ought not to dwell on World 2 longer than necessary. This Popperian standpoint was a pity, for states of mind are present and we cannot live and especially cannot live with other people unless we construct them, even though these constructions do not correspond to hard facts. We need folk psychology, and folk psychology is a body of knowl-

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edge even if it is, as we have argued, a body of knowledge that is a referent without a determinable reference. For this reason the categories of true and false and the demand for falisifiability need not apply to it. But given the ubiquitousness of that body of knowledge and its importance, it would have deserved more than short shrift—or at least as careful a scrutiny as quantum mechanics itself. Popper ought to have reviewed the received view of psychology. In that received view, psychology was a science which had a certain subject matter and it was the business of that science to make true statements about that subject matter. If those statements included statements about the unconscious, Popper maintained, the statements were not scientific, because statements about the unconscious are unfalsifiable. But a review of the received view of psychology would have shown that there is no subject matter. There are only constructions of eloquence and such constructions are unfalsifiable, whether they include statements about the unconscious or not. Seeing that psychological statements about how one feels and about how one feels that way because one has an unconscious wish to, say, kill one's father, are all pieces of manufactured eloquence about silent neurons, there is no point in wondering which statements are more correct about the silent buzzes or somatic markers than others. Nor is there any point in maintaining, as Popper did, that the ones that postulate unconscious wishes are less empirical than the ones that do not. Unfalsifiability applies to all psychological statements, the conscious ones as well as the unconscious ones. But there is yet another side to this matter which Popper disregarded and which he ought to have considered as scrupulously as he regarded the difficulties with quantum mechanics. Freud's concern was, for the most part, with people who feel compelled or display a compulsion to act or think in a way which is either painful to themselves or to others. It does not matter whether they were paralyzed beyond their control or whether they feel an irresistible compulsion to wash their hands until the skin was rubbed raw. What matters is how to explain the compulsiveness. It is here that Freud's postulate of unconscious motivation works wonders. Whether it is true, as he claimed, that the compulsion stops when an unconscious content is made conscious may be open to doubt. But the idea that the compulsiveness derives from the fact that the reason why people wash their hands all the time and cannot stop themselves even though they are injuring their skin is in their unconscious is an appealing and attractive hypothesis. In fact, speaking from hard good sense, where else could it be? If they are doing something that goes against their conscious reason as well as against their own best self-interest and if they are doing it to the point at which they are actually causing themselves suffering, the reason why they

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are doing it must be unconscious. It may be doubtful whether that reason comes from unconscious content which has been repressed, but it can hardly be doubted that the reason must be unconscious. If they were conscious of how they are making themselves suffer, they would not continue the behavior that causes them suffering. Why do they have such quasisuicidal tendencies when they are claiming in so many words that they have none? I think there are good Popperian reasons to keep wondering about the scientific status of the postulate that there is an unconscious, but we ought not to be satisfied with Popper's impeccable demonstration that any theory which admits that there is an unconscious is beyond the boundaries of science. There may well be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Popper's philosophy of science. When it comes to psychology, there is indeed an indication that Popper's falsification criterion is deficient. We do know from the mere possibility that forgotten events can be retrieved, that, though forgotten, the memory is lodged somewhere from where we cannot retrieve it. What is more, retrieval is more often than not achieved by very devious routes. We are helped to retrieve sometimes by concentrating on something disconnected with what we want to retrieve and sometimes by not concentrating on anything at all. Such experiences then lead to a further question: Why did something that is seemingly unconnected with what we want to recall help the recall, and why did that unconnected something come up just when we want to recall something it is unconnected with? This amounts to saying that there are memories we are not conscious of. Popper would have no difficulty with the fact that there is unconscious storage. His real difficulty is with the causal efficacy of unconscious storage. This then leads to another question: Can memories we are not conscious of be the cause of behavior without first becoming conscious? The answer is most probably, pace Popper, in the affirmative. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of blindsight, in which we can, for example, grasp a pencil without being conscious that we are seeing that pencil. By the same token it is possible to see a pencil and grasp it but be conscious that what we are grasping is not a pencil but a penis. If the object grasped is something indecent or objectionable, one can easily assume that there is a motive why one would consciously think one is grasping a pencil when, in reality, one is reaching for the penis. The conscious belief is here being manipulated to act as a disguise. The phenomenon of blindsight is well documented, though nobody knows how such a bypass of consciousness works. Whichever way, the phenomenon indicates that Popper's philosophy of science fails to do justice to psychology in its inevitably folk-psychological mode.

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But let us stay with the fact of the unfalsifiablity of all psychology. The unfalsifiability is due to the fact that neuronally induced moods do not carry sufficient information to falsify any statement that is made to label them. This lack of information is, in turn, not due to our ignorance of neuronal functioning, so that we might hope, one day, to know enough about them to allow us to decide which label is right and which label is wrong. It is a lack in principle: Even if we understood all of neuronal functioning and their production of somatic markers in terms of chemistry and physics, we still could not correlate them to verbally articulated emotions or states of mind in a one-to-one correspondence. It is with psychological statements as it is with the justification of the admission of homosexuals to the Jesuit Order. A newly elected English intellectual Vicar General, in direct defiance of a Papal command, justified his refusal to exclude homosexuals: "If you don't screw, it does not matter whom you don't screw!" Since even the most patent eloquence about somatic markers and moods does not correspond to those markers and moods because it adds information to them, it is as unfalsifiable as any eloquence about contents alleged to be unconscious. If you cannot falsify any conscious state of mind, it does not matter whether there are some which cannot be falsified because they are said to be lodged in the unconscious. Where psychology is concerned, Popper, one must conclude, painted himself into a corner, because he took it for granted that there are conscious states of mind which can be falsified. In reality, the falsifiable "facts" are neuronal firings and the chemical reactions of the synapses. The rest is manufactured. Since almost anything can be manufactured to give a name and habitation to those silent neuronal events, it does not matter whether the manufactured eloquence includes talk about the operation of unconscious states of mind or not. Malcolm Macmillan observes that, since there is no "second script" which could be used to verify or falsify the suggestions made by the therapist, no interpretation and no manufactured eloquence can ever be considered "correct."106 One has to agree with this observation. Where states of mind are concerned, there is indeed "no point-to-point representation as by pipeline from the tip of your little finger to your somato-sensory cortex's little finger region."107 But one must add that there is also an absence of a second script in ordinary psychology. Macmillan's observation must therefore not be confined to depth psychology. The markers and moods are not a script, except in the trivial sense that the neurons can be ascertained as so much physics and chemistry and the somatic markers (the subjective inner feels the neurons generate) as so many metaphors. Therefore, neither neurons nor markers can confirm or deny anything said about them. Wittgenstein wrote, "Nothing seems more possible to me than that

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people some day will come to the definite opinion that there is no copy in the . . . nervous system which corresponds to a particular thought, or a particular idea, or memory" 108 Consider the example of the Rat Man. Freud explained his peculiar behavior and the anxieties that accompanied it as due to the fact that the man identified with rats. This proposed explanation is a perfectly legitimate piece of psychological reasoning. However, like all psychological reasoning, it is, in the absence of a second script, impure, for there cannot be proof that he did. Freud thought that the impurity of the reasoning is removed when the identification with rats can be explained as the result of an unconscious thought. He suggested that the man resented marriage (heiraten), but that this resentment was repressed into the unconscious and caused him to resent rats because of the second syllable of the German for marriage. The obsession with rats was the manifest result of the repressed resentment of marriage. What Freud did not see was that an explanation in terms of the unconscious further removed the proposition from confirmation. Freud thought that it would bring it within the grasp of science and transform the initial folk psychology into a scientific psychology because his explanation assigned a cause to the obsession. The tricky thing is, however, that there are people who compulsively identify with rats, even though, whether they confirm or deny it it, there cannot be scientific certainty about whether they really do or whether they are only imagining they are doing it. The postulate that the identification is made compulsive by coming from the unconscious so that the unconscious content is a cause cannot make it scientific, for the presence of content repressed into the unconscious makes the proposition that the compulsiveness was due to a resentment of marriage, pace Freud, less falsifiable, not more falsifiable. It may well be that the best explanation of a person's behavior or thoughts is that he or she identified with rats or, for that matter, with Napoleon. Denial or confirmation need not affect the plausibility of the psychological reasoning at all. But there the matter must rest. The reasoning is made worse, not better, by the postulate that the cause of the identification is unconscious. THE "NEW SCIENCE" The real difficulties one must have with Freud are very different from the difficulties diagnosed by Popper and Griinbaum. The real difficulties come from Freud's contention that he has discovered a new science. The term "new science" was first used by Giambattista Vico in the first half of the eighteenth century. The object of Vico's new science was to disclose something that had been hidden—in his case, the ideal

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eternal history which is behind the separate histories of all nations and to show that the ideal history reveals a deep structure which is common to all. Since then, similar attempts were made by Karl Marx and, in the twentiety century by Levi-Strauss. All in all, as Ellenberger correctly observed in our modern intellectual climate, unmasking is in the air.109 Both Shaw and Ibsen unmasked and tried to expose pious attitudes to family and fatherland for what they were in reality. Marx tried to show that culture and politics, art and thought are determined by the underlying infrastructure of the class struggle. Levi-Strauss tried to demonstrate that the meaning of all mythology is to mediate between contradictory institutions such as raw and cooked food, war and peace, exogamy and endogamy, the practice of incest and the taboo on incest, or conflicting perceptions of life and death. Freud comes with Vico and Marx and Levi-Strauss: He believed that he had discovered what really determines human action and belief as well as human neuroses. Since human beings are libidinous powerhouses, the direct expression of the power they generate has to be either repressed or restructured or both. Everything that happens and is thought and created is a function of these processes. This was Freud's new science. That new science committed Freud to a dogmatic belief that his ontology—human beings are libidinous dynamos—is the real reality and that all other manifestations of human behavior and thought are disguises or symbols of what is really happening. In this view, a symbol is something that disguises a hidden reality. It refers to that hidden reality, but cannot stand on its own feet. This means that symbols are less real than the feelings and impulses they symbolize and that there is a one-way connection between symbol and symbolized. The symbol in all cases derives its meaning from the thing it symbolizes, and it cannot be the other way round. A tree, a violin, a tower—are all symbols of the phallus, and when people think or speak of trees, they are really intending to mean phallus. But—and this is the crucial point of the new science—it cannot be the other way around. The symbol is secondary and inferior to the real reality. It merely serves the function of hiding the reality. It takes a lot of dogma to maintain such an ontology. At best, it can only be one among a number of competing ontologies. Without this dogmatic ontology, the process of symbolization is much more diffuse and polyvalent. For Freud, symbols represent what has been repressed into the unconscious, and only what has been repressed is symbolized. Though a symbol can be something imagined or imaginary, it derives its meaning from the repressed content of the unconscious. If the symbol is pathological, like compulsory hand washing, it derives that pathogenic force from the unconscious content it symbolizes. Freud is making

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a very clear distinction between real causal forces and the imaginary symbols of these forces. A violin can symbolize a penis, but a penis cannot symbolize a violin. The penis, representing real libido, is a genuine causal agent, but a violin, real or imaginary, is a product of fantasy used to symbolize the penis because one dare not mention "penis." When Freud gave up the Project, he did not give up the scientific paradigm which had prompted it. Throughout his life, he held firm to the belief that psychology was a natural science and compared his concept of drive or libido to the physicist's concept of electricity110 Hence came his firm conviction that his ontology was the hard rock of reality and that all other things that happened were symbols which disguised that hard rock. The way Freud dogmatically clung to his ontology has been described by Habermas as a "scientistic misunderstanding," for Freud mistook a certain ontology as the dictate of science.111 In reality, Freudian psychology is only one of many possible ways of doing psychology, not, as Freud thought, the only way. He thought it the only way because he thought it scientific and he thought it scientific because his ontology, derived from certain biological considerations about sex and reproduction, had a privileged and monopolistic status. If this ontology is deprived of its privileged status and the idea that we are getting a new science abandoned, we can see that the relationship between symbol and the thing that is symbolized is both fairly arbitrary and certainly reversible. Take arbitrariness first, and consider the long debate about Melanie Klein's deviation from Freud. Freudian ontology and its refusal to recognize the reversibility of symbol and thing symbolized has led to a maddening controversy. According to Melanie Klein, a certain "feel" means the breast; according to Freud, a certain "feel" means the phallus. There is no possible way in which these ascriptions of meaning could be justified and the debate resolved. What we have in reality is that both breast and phallus are interpretations and, therefore, if you will, symbols of a certain neuronally induced awareness. It is nothing but a self-inflicted muddle to claim that one or the other is the correct symbol. The fact of reversibility becomes a serious criticism of Freudian reasoning. Take the distinction between anal and oral pleasure. Preference for oral satisfaction tends to be associated with submissiveness and dependency. Preference for anal satisfaction tends to be associated with obstinacy, parsimony, and orderliness. In Freud's view, fixation on anal or oral satisfaction is the reality and the associated behavior is the symbol. But without Freud's ontology which takes libido as the biological reality which organizes and determines everything else, the relationship between oral satisfaction and dependency could well be

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the other way around. Conscious talk of a violin conceals the penis, but, at the same time, it reveals something about the penis. For now the penis is revealed to have some of the functions or qualities of a violin. It is also conceivable, once libido is no longer posited as the real reality distinct from an imaginary reality that it could be the penis which is in the conscious mind and the violin the image that is repressed into the unconscious so that the penis becomes a symbol of the violin. In this case, the penis now conceals the violin, but could also be taken to reveal something about the violin which would not be known if the violin is simply considered as a violin. Insofar as we are uncovering the violin behind the penis, we are reducing an illusion (i.e., the illusion that a violin is nothing but a violin). Insofar as we are learning to see the violin as a penis, we are also restoring a new meaning to it. A symbol both disguises and reveals because one cannot say that one side of the relationship is real and the other side a mere symbol of the real. If one lets go of one's dogmatic belief that one knows what is "real," a symbolic relationship becomes reversible. Each side of the relationship symbolizes the other and each side disguises something about the other and also reveals something about the other. Repressed content symbolizes a manifest image, and a manifest image can reveal something about the repressed content.112 Let us examine the doctrine that the relation between symbol and symbolized content is irreversible in one of Freud's examples. In his story of the Rat Man, Freud takes it that the repressed content of Heirat (marriage) and of Spielratte (compulsive gambler) is symbolized by rats. Why not the other way around? A person interested in rats could be taken to have developed a morbid interest in his or other people's marriage. He need not be seen as a person who uses rats as wedding symbols, but could be seen as a person who thinks of weddings as if they were rats or ratty. True, the rat could disguise the wedding phobia; but equally, the wedding may disguise something about rats (i.e., that they are unhygienic little rodents who worry away at bodies). Similarly, if the wedding reveals something about rats, rats could reveal something about weddings (i.e., that they are aggressive and unhygienic acts, the consequences of which are hard to control). The rat could be seen to disguise something about the wedding, and the wedding could be seen to reveal something about rats. Equally, the reverse could hold: The wedding could disguise something about rats and rats could be taken to reveal something about weddings—which, put bluntly, states that one hates weddings as one hates rats, or the reverse, I enjoy rats as I enjoy weddings. We must conclude that irreversibility can only be established by the theory that there is repression of what one dislikes. If one hates wed-

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dings, one will repress weddings and think of rats instead because one does not wish to admit that one hates weddings. The rats symbolize the repressed content and not the other way around. But even so, why should one not hate rats and repress that hatred and then think of weddings as symbols of rat hatred. Only when the Oedipal complex is invoked and added to the repression theory can final irreversibility be established. For then weddings are obviously more dicey than rats: Seeing that one would have liked to marry one's mother, one does not wish to imitate one's father when he married one's mother. Hence, weddings are hateful. Speaking Oedipally, rats are neutral or, at least, more neutral than weddings. In an Oedipal situation, it is weddings that are to be feared, not rats. Therefore, a rat can symbolize the repressed wedding, but not the other way around. A rat can become a penis or sex symbol, but a wedding could not possibly become a rat symbol. But here we are beginning to go around in circles. Irreversibility is not a fact of nature. In nature and in mind anything can stand for anything or the other way around. In order to establish the irreversibility that is required if one thing is to be seen as a clue to another, one needs the theory of repression and, in addition, an Oedipal situation. However, as we have seen, both repression and the postulate that what has been repressed continues to reside in the unconscious and act from there as well as the Oedipal situation itself stand on shaky ground so that one cannot use them to establish irreversibility; and yet irreversibility is required if there is to be access to repressed content. The circularity is not avoided when we listen to Freud's own argument as to what is symbol and what is symbolized. He states that the irreversible meaning of symbols is not derived from clinical findings. So far so good. But then he goes on to say that we learn it from different sources, such as jokes, fairy tales, folklore, and myths in which there are symbols of thoughts and institutions and actions which are forbidden. He continues that "we cannot fail to be convinced of our interpretations" (i.e., a tree stands for a penis, but not the other way around).113 It is perfectly true that since Freud we have become used to new readings of myths and folklore and to see them as symbols of forbidden thoughts and acts which are too obscene or too daring to be mentioned in so many words, but it does not follow that that is what they mean. The irreversible interpretations which are nowadays being put on them are not necessarily, let alone obviously, their original purpose. When, at baptism, a priest plunges a candle into the water, we think we know that the candle stands for a penis and the water for a vagina or a womb. But the ritual itself is dumb and, when left alone, tells us nothing of the sort. We need the Freudian doctrine of irreversibility—that is, that a

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penis must not be mentioned but that a candle is innocuous and can be mentioned—in order to use the ritual to prove irreversibility. In Freud's thought, the manifest image can only lead to the unconscious content, but cannot shed new light on it. In the revised version, the traffic becomes two way. In good folk psychology, one can say that a person who is playing the violin is really masturbating, or hoping to, or wishing that he might be allowed to do so, or remembering that he was doing so. Conversely, one can say that a person who is masturbating is thinking of playing a violin, hoping to do so, or remembering that he had been playing the violin. Freud exploited the fact that it is socially more acceptable to play the violin than to masturbate in order to deduce from it that there is no reason why violin playing should be repressed and manifest itself as masturbation, while there is every reason why masturbation should be repressed and manifest itself as violin playing. Hence, he concluded, the symbolic relationship is one way. Violin playing is a symbol of masturbation, but masturbation cannot possibly be a symbol of violin playing. Pragmatically, he was right, but one cannot or should not infer an ontology from a pragmatic consideration. For this is precisely what Freud did. He took it that we all want to masturbate but are not permitted to do so. The wish to do so is the biological reality and the violin playing the symbol which disguises the reality. But as soon as one drops the pragmatic consideration, the foundation of this ontology, which makes the relationship between symbol and symbolized content a one-way relation, breaks down. Both Jiirgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur have argued in favor of such a revision of the Freudian enterprise.114 They have christened the reversal a hermeneutic enterprise. Seeing that Griinbaum finds so much fault with Freud's science, one would have thought that he would consider Habermas's and Ricoeur's revision of Freud with the greatest sympathy. Not so: He turns out to be more hostile to the revisionists than to Freud himself. He devotes nearly one-third of his entire book to a refutation of Habermas's and Ricoeur's hermeneutic revision and describes it as "the kiss of death."115 But Griinbaum thinks about Habermas and Ricoeur as he thinks about Popper: They are interlopers in the Freud-criticism industry over which he claims a monopoly. I hesitate to adopt the term "hermeneutic" for this revision of the dogmatic Freudian ontology because it has been used too often as a shibboleth of woolly thinking. Whenever people nowadays get impatient with clarity and logic, they justify their impatience by a claim to be engaged in a hermeneutic enterprise. But this particular revision could justly be called hermeneutic, because it amounts to saying that symbols reveal as well as disguise and that the relationship between

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conscious and unconscious is reversible. The Freudian diagnostic method of using the symbol as a disguise which leads to the reality is replaced by the hermeneutic method in which each side helps to shed light on the other side of the relationship: The meaning of a penis is enlarged by a violin, and the meaning of a violin is enlarged by a penis. There is not a reality on one side and a symbol on the other, but a mutual relationship which can best be described as hermeneutic. Freud, I am sure, would have rejected such a revision and Griinbaum would have supported him in such a rejection. Griinbaum writes, "It behoves us to appraise Freud by his own standards."116 But I cannot accept that we are compelled to do so. I prefer to stay with Popper, who wrote at the end of his autobiographical Unended Quest, "As with our children, so with our theories, and ultimately with all work we do: our products become largely independent of their makers. We may gain more knowledge from our children or from our theories than we ever imparted to them."117 Popper himself never practiced what he here preached and never allowed his theories to be handled by his followers, and I have no reason to believe that Freud would have been prepared to let go of his "children" any more than Popper did. But this does not justify Griinbaum's argument that we must never extrapolate from Freud or elaborate him. In plain defiance of Griinbaum and with the blessing of Popper's final words in his Unended Quest, this is precisely what will be attempted in Chapter 5. Without the hermeneutic revision and with Freud's contention that psychology is a natural science, one would remain committed to a definition of sanity which is unrealistic. And this is where the rub lies. If one claims to know what is really happening (i.e., that humans are libidinous dynamos) and that a whole range of activities and feelings and thoughts are either symbols of such repressed reality or sublimations of reality, one must define sanity as acceptance to and conformity with that reality. It is true that Freud had no illusions and was anything but naive about sanity and its attainment. First of all, he preferred to speak of maturity, rather than of sanity. Second, he realized that maturity can, at best, be recognized not as such, but by its effects. We are mature, he said, when we can love and work. And third, he recognized that there are no final cures, for even when we can love and work, all we have achieved is the conversion of hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness. But if one makes an absolute distinction between what is really happening and what is a mere symbol, one is implying that sanity consists of being and keeping in touch with reality. People who remain captive to fantasies are not sane. This definition of sanity depends on the view that there are states of mind which reflect reality and states of mind

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which do not. Expressed in the vernacular, a person who thinks he or she is Napoleon is not sane. A person who realizes that he or she is not Napoleon is. If one lets go of this distinction and accepts the need for the revised, hermeneutic view of the relation between symbol and symbolized, such a ready and easy definition of insanity eludes us. In the revised version, one cannot say what is a state of mind that reflects reality and what is not. One cannot say this because one cannot assign certain states of mind a priority over others and claim that they reflect a reality while others are mere symbols of a reality. It is always tempting to cling to the old definition of insanity, because it appears to be so reasonable. In so clinging, one is resisting the revised view of the relationship between symbol and symbolized. That is, it is always easier to claim that a person who is playing the violin is really masturbating than to accept the possibility that a person who is masturbating is really dreaming of playing a violin. It is indeed possible to define sanity as the realization that when one is playing the violin one is really thinking of masturbation. The acceptance of the revised version is therefore dependent on the discovery of a new definition of sanity. Without a new definition of sanity the revised version becomes both brittle and unpractical. Fortunately, it is indeed possible to come up with an entirely different view of sanity which is not tied to a certain conception of what reality is like. In this new conception is does not matter whether one imagines one is Napoleon or not, provided one can snap out of it at will. This means that what matters is one's freedom of choice, not one's ability to gauge what is realistic behavior and conform to what one conceives to be so. Insanity, in this view, consists in the compulsion to enact a certain role and to manufacture one particular kind of eloquence. Sanity, by contrast, is the ability to manufacture any kind of eloquence at all, or, more pragmatically, to be able to manufacture eloquence within a large parameter of possibilities. It is true that since the revised version does not enable us to distinguish absolutely between fact and fantasy the revised version does not offer a ready definition of sanity. But no matter: As long as we can distinguish sane from insane behavior by some other method, the revised version remains viable. What is more, the new conception of sanity is compatible with Freud's view of maturity As long as one is free to stop imagining that one is Napoleon, one can work and love. One does not have to know for real that one is not Napoleon to do so. The ultimate argument against the understanding of psychology presented in this book as well as against the suggested reinterpretation of Freud's psychology is always the concern that one must be able to distinguish the sane from the insane, fact from fantasy, and reasonable from unreasonable behavior. I do not intend to deny

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that there is such an urgent need, but I would suggest that there is a perfectly viable distinction between sanity and insanity which is compatible with the view that psychology is a manufacture of eloquence about inchoate neuronal buzzes and their silent moods. In this view, there is no ready criterion for the distinction between fact and fantasy. There is, however, a criterion which enables us to tell sanity from insanity, or, at least, the more sane from the less sane. The more easily a person can switch freely from what some might describe as fact to what some might consider fantasy and back, the more sane he or she is. This argument considerably narrows the concept of illness, because it equates mental illness exclusively with the lack of freedom in the verbal construction of neuronally produced inchoate awareness. The word illness ought to be reserved for departures from ascertainable norms and one must bear in mind that such norms do not exist. As far as verbally defined states of mind are concerned, there is no ascertainable normal relation between them and reality. The neurons pick up less than there is in reality, and the verbal construction which makes them into a state of mind contains more information than the neuronal circuits warrant. So, by the time we confront the states of mind with the reality, there is no absolute correspondence at all and even quite extravagant interpretations of somatic markers should not be called an illness, for they are certainly no departure from a norm. These considerations are based on the pioneering work of Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness.118 A departure from a norm cannot be defined in neurological terms because all states of mind are, neurologically speaking, out of step with neurons. The eloquence they consist of goes beyond the information provided by neurons and somatic markers. If it is defined in psychological terms, any standard of what constitutes a state of mind which correctly reflects a real situation in the world is an arbitrary standard, because no state of mind, depending as it does on an interpretation of a somatic marker, can possibly reflect the reality which impinged on the neurons which produced the marker. If healthy neuronal functioning is taken as the norm, all states of mind are seen as pretenses and difficult ones are described as forms of malingering. If an arbitrary standard of what makes a healthy mind is adopted, the psychologist's or psychiatrist's judgment is allowed to overrule the patient's avowal and define the latter as an illness. To quote Szasz, "The traditional malingering approach to hysteria is essentially one of disbelief and rejection. Conversely, the psychoanalytic attitude is characterized by the listener's belief in what the patient says; however, the belief is based on accepting the utterance only as a report and not as a true proposition."119 There is the proviso that what the patient

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is saying is probably false and that the psychoanalyst will soon find out w h a t the "real troubles" are. I will return to Szasz's recommendation as to h o w both the traditional medical attitude and the psychoanalytic attitude ought to be overcome and replaced by the pragmatics of a protolanguage in Chapter 5. Here, it is enough to admit that the present rejection of Freudian ontology which does not allow for the reversibility of cause and symbol and which insists that there is a one-way relation between a repressed real cause and its expressed symbol was first stressed by Szasz's pioneering work in the early 1960s. It follows from this rejection that Freud's belief that wellness, no matter h o w relative, consists of a correct relation to reality, his famous "reality principle," cannot be allowed to stand. NOTES 1. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 19551964), 19:13 (hereafter cited as S.E.). 2. S.E., 14: 16. 3. R. Wollheim, Sigmund Freud (New York: Viking, 1971), 272. 4. F. Sulloway, "Reassessing Freud's Case Histories/' Isis 82 (1991): 246247. 5. S.E., 23: 260. 6. Peter Medawar, "Victims of Psychiatry," New York Review of Books, 23 January 1975, p. 17. 7. Peter Munz, "Darwinism," Encyclopaedia of Applied Ethics, Vol. 1 (San Diego: Academic Press, 1997), 708. 8. S.E., 14: 166. 9. Cf. N. F. Dixon, Preconscious Processing (New York: Wiley, 1981); H. Shevrin, "Subliminal Perception and Repression," in Repression and Dissociation, ed. J. Singer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also the well researched phenomenon of "hypermnesia" in M. D. Ionescu and M. H. Erdelyi, "The Direct Recovery of Subliminal Stimuli," in Perception without Awareness, ed. R. F. Bornstein and T. S. Pittman (New York: Guilford Press, 1992), 143-169. 10. S.E., 10:155-318. 11. See M. H. Erdelyi, Psychoanalysis (New York: Freeman, 1985), 51. 12. S.E., 19: 200; 20: 70. 13. S.E., 6: 242, 253-254; 11: 29, 38, 52. 14. R. E. Fancher, Psychoanalytical Psychology: The Development of Freud's Thought (New York: Norton, 1973). 15. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 246-248.

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16. See H. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (London: Fontana, 1970), 481-484. 17. S.E., 1: 259. 18. For example, Auguste Comte, Discours sur Vesprit positif, ed. I. Fetscher (Meiner: Hamburg, 1956), 91. 19. See Peter Munz, Philosophical Darwinism (London: Routledge, 1993), Ch. 2 for the ascendancy of such positivism in the nineteenth century, for its dubious credentials, and for the lipservice paid to it by all leading scientists because they took it that it was "politically correct" to follow Comte. 20. Peter Gay, Freud (London: Papermac, 1989), 35. For the sources of Freud's positivism see also Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 535. 21. W. J. McGrath, Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 141-142. 22. Ibid., 143. 23. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 478. 24. The Complete Letters ofSigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, trans, and ed. J. M. Masson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985), 146. This letter is proof that Freud, with the modest technical and neurological means at his disposal, anticipated the entire project of Eliminative Materialism at the end of the nineteenth century. 25. Cf., for example, H. Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975), xiii. 26. Adolf Griinbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 52. 27. Quoted by L. Hudson, "Charmed Sceptic," Times Literary Supplement, 25 August 1995, p. 10, col. 3. Cf. W. H. Calvin, The Cerebral Symphony (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 93. For Freud's anticipation of cognitive science, see F. J. Varela, E. Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 47. 28. Paul Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). 29. Cf., for example, Freud, S.E., 22: 154. 30. As suggested by Thomas Nagel, "'Freud's Permanent Revolution': An Exchange," New York Review of Books, 11 August 1994, p. 56. 31. S.E., 14: 222-235. 32. Griinbaum, Foundations of Psychoanalysis, 3-5. 33. Karl H. Pribram, "Review of M. Reiser, Mind, Brain and Body: Toward a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology," The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 174 (1986): 373. 34. See F. J. Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 94, 119-120. J. Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud, trans. C. Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 88-94; S. Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip, trans. K. Soper (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1976), 184. 35. Thomas Nagel, "Freud's Anthropomorphism," ed. R. Wollheim, in Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Books, 1974), 11. See also R. C. Solomon, "Freud's Neurological Theory of Mind," ed. R.

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Wollheim, in Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Books, 1974), 25. 36. J. Allan Hobson, The Dreaming Brain (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1990), 44,64. R. Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 174 sees only the "bizarre" in the Project and does not stop to think why Freud remained in "thrall" to it. Griinbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, 3. 37. Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1968-1986), 17:126; cf. also 17: 80. A less precise translation is in Freud, S.E., 23:196; cf. also 23:158. 38. Breuer, quoted in R. W. Clark, Freud (London: Cape, 1980), 139. 39. S.E., 14: 13-14. 40. Jean-Martin Charcot, Clinical Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Vol. 3, trans. T. Savill (London: New Sydenham Society, 1889), 13. 41. C. Gertz, Charcot, the Clinician (New York: Raven, 1987), 24-25,110. 42. S.E., 14: 17-18. 43. S.E., 17:97. 44. S.E., 1: 259. 45. S.E., 1: 260. 46. M. Meyer, Ibsen (London: Sphere Books, 1992), 635ff. 47. Cf. W. N. Morris, Intimate Behaviour (London: Triad/Grafton Books, 1971), 12. See also D. W. Winnicot, The Family and Individual Development (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 3, and the many works of John Bowlby. 48. C. G. Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters, ed. W. McGuire (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1991), 271. 49. C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R. R C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 224. 50. E. Jones, Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 32. 51. Sigmund Freud, Complete Introductory Lectures of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1966), 584. 52. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, ed. J. M. Masson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985), 264-265. 53. J. M. Masson, The Assault on Truth (New York: Penguin Press, 1985). 54. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 50. 55. S.E., 14: 7-66. 56. P. B. Jacobsen and R. S. Steele, "From Present to Past: Freudian Archeology," International Review of Psychoanalysis 6 (1979): 358. Or listen again to Freud's own words in his An Autobiographical Study, "The neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful fantasies, and that, as far as the neurosis was concerned, psychical reality was of more importance than material reality," S.E., 20: 34. 57. S.E., 20: 32-33. 58. S.E., 16: 370. 59. S.E., 4: 288; 6: 259; 16: 336, 370; 17: 103n; 23: 177. 60. S.E., 1: 233. 61. Steven Rose, The Making of Memory (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1993), 287.

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62. Antonio R. Damasio and Hanna Damasio, "Brain and Language," Scientific American 267, 3 (1992): 65. 63. Masson, Assault on Truth. 64. D. M. Bourneville and P. Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere, Vol. 2 (Paris: V. A. Delahaye & Cie., 1876-1880), 126 (for the story of Augustine), 67 (for the story of Genevieve). 65. Gay, Freud, 94-95. 66. S.E., 14: 8. 67. Jones, Sigmund Freud, 289. 68. Ibid., 292-294. 69. Allen Esterson, Seductive Mirage (Chicago: Open Court, 1993), 28-29. 70. Ibid., 30. 71. Frederick Crews, "The Unknown Freud," New York Review of Books, 18 November 1993, p. 62. 72. K. R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge, 1963), 34-37. 73. See K. R. Popper, Realism and the Aims of Science (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 162. 74. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 36. 75. Ibid., 34-36. 76. Cf. T. Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors (London: Routledge, 1977), 24, 29, 38. 77. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longman, 1902), 207. 78. Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994). 79. Gay, Freud, 609. 80. Ibid., 469. 81. S.E., 2: 279-280. 82. S.E., 7: 39. 83. Cf., for example, D. S. Holmes, "The Evidence for Repression," in Repression and Dissociation, ed. J. L. Singer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 96. 84. Griinbaum, Foundations of Psychoanalysis. 85. S.E., 14: 265-266. 86. Griinbaum, Foundations of Psychoanalysis, 38-39. 87. Ibid., 38. 88. Mario Bunge, Philosophy and Psychology (New York: Springer, 1987), 113. 89. Griinbaum, Foundations of Psychoanalysis, 125-126. 90. S.E., 18: 3 (Editor's Note). K. R. Eissler, Medical Orthodoxy and the Future of Psychoanalysis (New York: International Universities Press, 1965), 395. Gay, Freud (New York: Norton, 1988), 267. 91. S.E., 15: 67. 92. Frederick Crews, Skeptical Engagements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 91.

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93. M. Edelson, Psychoanalysis: A Theory in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 268-269. 94. S. Fisher and R. P. Greenberg, The Scientific Credibility of Freud's Theory and Therapy (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 95. A. M. Cooper, "Psychoanalysis at One Hundred: Beginnings of Maturity," Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association 32 (1984): 259. 96. Munz, "Darwinism," 707. 97. Ibid., 708. 98. Edward Glover, "Research Methods in Psychoanalysis," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 33 (1952): 403. 99. Cf. Griinbaum, "Precis of the Foundations of Psychoanalysis," in Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science, ed. P. Clark and C. Wrights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 30. 100. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 38. 101. K. R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, trans. K. R. Popper (London: Hutchinson, 1959). 102. Griinbaum, Foundations of Psychoanalysis, 270. 103. Ibid. 104. S.E., 16:452. 105. Esterson, Seductive Mirage, 133. 106. Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991), 564. 107. W. H. Calvin, The Cerebral Symphony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 167. 108. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 504. 109. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 537. 110. S.E., 23: 281-283. HI. Jiirgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 300-332. 112. Peter Munz, When the Golden Bough Breaks (London: Routledge, 1973), 89f. 113. S.E., 12: 335-337; 5: 351. 114. Jiirgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. D. Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 115. Griinbaum, Foundations of Psychoanalysis, 92-93. 116. Ibid., 94. 117. K. R. Popper, Unended Quest (London: Fontana,1976), 196. 118. Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness ( New York: Harper & Row, 1961). 119. The Myth of Mental Illness (London: Paladin, 1962), 122-123.

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4 Time, Space, and Memory

Ich habe es schon an anderer Stelle ausgesprochen: Wenn man der unbestrittene Liebling der Mutter gewesen ist, so behalt man furs Leben jenes Eroberergefiihl, jene Zuversicht des Erfolges, welche nicht selten wirklich den Erfolg nach sich zieht. Und eine Bemerkung solcher Art wie: meine Starke wurzelt in meinem Verhaltnis zur Mutter, hatte Goethe seiner Lebensgeschichte mit Recht voranstellen diirfen. [I have already remarked elsewhere that if a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout his life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it. And Goethe might well have given some such heading to his autobiography.]1 Maman lisait en m'attendant,. . . parce que, ne m'ayant pas reconnu tout de suite, des que de la gondole je Tappelais elle, envoyait vers moi, du fond de son coeur, son amour qui ne s'arretait que la ou il n'y avait plus de matiere pour le soutenir a la surface de son regard passionne qu'elle faisait aussi proche de moi que possible, qu'elle cherchait a exhausser, a Tavancee de ses levres, en un sourire qui semblait m'embrasser, dans le cadre et sous le dais du sourire plus discret de Togive illuminee par le soleil de midi. [Mamma was sitting reading while she waited for me to return... since not having recognized me at first, as soon as I called to her from the gondola, she sent out to me, from the bottom of her heart, a love which stopped only where there was no longer any material substance to support it on the surface of her impassioned gaze which she brought as close to me as possible, which she tried to thrust forward to the advanced post of her lips, in a smile which seemed to be kissing me, in the framework and beneath the canopy of the more discreet smile of the arched window illuminated by the midday sun.]2

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The differences in the prose of Freud and Proust are easy to recognize and have become almost commonplace. On one side there is the robust common sense of Freud, a style admirably chiselled to express the straight discoveries of a scientific mind intent upon telling the truth and nothing but the truth, a robust and honest German which one could easily imagine to display in language the famous Loose imperative for architecture that "decoration is a crime." On the other hand, there is the French of Proust, full of poetical ellipsis and frequently couched in the form of interrogative elusiveness. Proust's long chains of repetitive and often questioning assertions, of strings of metaphors mounted on top of each other to form long lists of enumerations, make a single sentence in appearance only. All this conveys an air of the unreal, of quite idiosyncratic intimacy of a kind too deeply inward and too deeply tender to stand up in the battle for life or sustain an argument for or against truth, let alone a confrontation with anything real. Critics as diverse as Andre Gide and Edmund Wilson were contemptuous of Proust's escapism. What kind of insight can one expect from a man who does not confine inversion to his sexual habits but allows them to dominate his real life so that he sleeps when the world is awake and is awake when the world is asleep? If anybody has any doubt as to the nature of the difference in style, one should compare how Freud and Proust describe a woman. In order to show how obvious the difference is, I will quote both Freud and Proust in English translation so that one can see that even in a foreign language the difference is striking. With the onset of puberty the maturing of the female sexual organs, which up till then have been in a condition of latency, seems to bring about an intensification of the original narcissism, and this is unfavorable to the development of a true object-choice with its accompanying sexual overvaluation. Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of object. Strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to that of man's love for them. Nor does their need lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved; and the man who fulfils this condition is the one who finds favor with them.3 Here is Proust on the same theme: Albertine continued to sleep. I might take her head, turn it round, press it to my lips, encircle my neck in her arms, she continued to sleep like a watch that does not stop, like an animal that goes on living whatever position you assign to it, like a climbing plant, like a convulvulus which continues to thrust up its tendrils whatever support you give it. Only her breathing was altered by every touch of my fingers, as though she had been an instrument on which

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I was playing and from which I extracted modulations by drawing from first one, then another of its strings different notes.4

There is no need to labor the point. I wish to argue, however, that the evocations of our senses produced by these different styles are deceptive. Freud writes like a calm, cool, collected scientist reporting the facts as they are. Proust writes like a gently but deeply passionate poet whose imaginings have carried him beyond the common, and certainly beyond common sense, and whose prose, beautiful though it is, strains our credulity and, at times, even our patience. At most, if there is any reference to a reality in it, we might concede it is a report of a highly esoteric experience. Nevertheless, I want to show that it is Proust who gets hold of reality and Freud who has launched himself on a beautifully imaginative construction of a world which most probably does not exist. It is Proust who is the realistic scientist and Freud who is the poet entrapped in his own fanciful imaginings about time and causality. A comparison between Proust and Freud is not far-fetched. Similarities have been noticed often enough, and M. Bowie, inFreud, Lacan and Proust, devotes a whole chapter to them.5 It seems to me more interesting and more important to notice, given the similarity of their preoccupation with the power of the past to influence us and with the power of memory to recall the past, the great differences between them. In their own way they each provided a vocabulary for talking about our inner emotions. They manufactured a lot of eloquence about mental events which are at the best of times difficult to cast into words. They did so more or less at the same time, one in French and the other in German. They did so at a moment in the history of the mind when such intimate vocabularies had become an urgent necessity. They both had strong Jewish backgrounds and adjusted themselves as best they could to the two great metropolitan capitals of European culture before World War I. Freud was greatly handicapped in his career by the prevailing antisemitism of Habsburg bureaucracy, and Proust had to work his way through the Dreyfus affair as a major crisis in his life. Even a medical background brings them together: Freud began with medicine and Proust's father was one of the leading medical minds of his age in Paris. There is even a paper by Proust's father on a case of hysteria.6 And it is conceivable that when Freud was in Paris to study with Charcot he could have run into Proust's father at one or another evening reception for the medical fraternity. It is true that there was a difference in age. Freud was born in 1856 and his sojourn in Paris took place in 1885 when Proust, his mother's firstborn, was fourteen years old. Last, not least, both Freud and Proust had something of the heroic about them. Freud, because of his effort at self-analysis, an unprec-

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edented and nonrepeatable achievement which alone, he thought, would inaugurate psychoanalytic therapy for mankind. Proust's final act of heroism is less famous and less philanthropic. When Proust had come more or less to the end of writing his great work, he literally committed an act of self-immolation in not allowing anybody, not even his brother Robert who was a physician, to come to his rescue in order to make quite sure that his pneumonia would kill him. With his work completed, Proust provided a living example of his knowledge that when time is regained and contingency annihilated the human mind has reached its own self-fulfillment and completion. They also shared a belief in the importance and value of the past and in the memory of that past. For Freud, much of an individual's past was stored in the unconscious and from there continued to influence his thoughts, feelings, and behavior. If such thoughts, feelings, and behavior became troublesome or unbearable, the best cure, according to Freud, was to gain access to the unconscious and recover the memories that were locked up in it. Such recovery would make the memories conscious and, conscious, they would either cease to trouble the present thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the person in question, or could be managed and controlled. The cure consisted in the implementation of the epigram, "Where id was, let ego be." Proust's position looked more poetic, but was, at bottom, very similar. Feelings of inadequacy, mediocrity, and loneliness, he thought, resulted from the loss of the past. There was, however, one important difference in the diagnosis of the loss of the past. The thing that troubled Proust was not the loss of this or that event, but the mere passage of time. As the less poetic Djuna Barnes put it, it does not matter how terrible the past was, but how terrible it is that the past is all gone! Freud, by contrast, was not troubled by the mere passage of time and by the loss of the past. He took it instead that we were troubled by specific events which had taken place in the past, which we have forgotten or repressed and which nevertheless keep influencing the present states of mind we are conscious of, and which we imagine to be controlling our behavior when, in reality, our behavior is being controlled by those events of the past. Hence, he was engaged in the search for lost time. When memory was activated and total recall took place, the therapeutic effect did not result from the recall of this or that, but from the fact of recall as such— a recall which would quite simply wipe out the passage of time. With such recall, the individual would cease to be mediocre and inadequate. It is important to stress the similarity of the thought pattern. For Freud, cure did not consist of a reversion to infancy. On the contrary, such a reversion to the infantile primary process with all excitation reduced

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to zero and all desires satisfied amounts to a state of death. He actually thought that the pleasure principle or the total indulgence of that principle served our death instincts.7 Cure or therapy, on the other hand, consisted of remaining an adult who was able to recall the past. The past, first, had to be lost. If it had not been lost, the therapeutic effect of the recall would not have been possible. Proust made exactly the same point when he said that we are not seeking paradise, but the paradise we have lost. Only when, thanks to forgetfulness of the past, the paradise of the past is restored, only then can we enjoy the emotional benefit of time regained. Yes, if a memory, thanks to forgetfulness, has been unable to contract any tie, to forge any link between the past and the present, if it has remained in its own place, of its own date, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or the peak of a mountain, it makes us suddenly breathe an air new to us just because it is an air we have formerly breathed, an air purer than the poets have vainly called Paradisiacal, which offers that deep sense of renewal only because it has been breathed before, inasmuch as the true paradises are the paradises we have lost.8 We start with an observation that lies behind both Freud and Proust and which, though common enough, was never remarked upon by either Freud or Proust. It is so common that everybody can make it for himself or herself once attention is drawn to it. Without that observation, neither Freud's nor Proust's system of ideas could work, as we shall see. The differences between Freud and Proust arise precisely from the diametrically opposed treatments they meted out to this observation. The observation concerns an aspect of memory which goes against all common sense and expectation and hinges on the fact that our nervous system, though itself subject to aging and to the process, not to say the ravages, of time, appears to contain no mechanism for making the memories stored in it or by it age with it, or for allowing this process of aging to affect memory impressions in any way. Close your eyes and recall two events in your life, one early one and one very recent. As soon as one is doing it, one will make the surprising comparison that insofar as one can recall events at all, they can be recalled with equal clarity and vivacity, regardless of the position they occupy in our perception of time. The early one will be as vivid and real as the recent one, though neither vividness nor clarity are a guarantee of veracity. Common sense would make us expect that the early one would have some patina on it, be unclear, fuzzy, misty, and the recent one would be more precise and more outlined and sharp. But this is not so. Our common-sense expectation is wrong. Insofar as we can recall at all, the events we recall are all equally vivid, no matter

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what point on the time scale we recall them from. Indeed, we often have greater difficulty in assigning them to a point on the time scale than we have in simply recalling them to mind. What is affected by the passing of time is the amount we can recall, though even here there is no clear relation between the amount we can recall and the passage of time. Events which happened a split second ago, for example, are almost impossible to recall if, as soon as they happen, we get interrupted and have no time to digest them or have them laid down. This means that temporal proximity by itself is no guarantee of ability to recall. Or take another example: When we get older, we tend to lose recent impressions more readily than very early childhood impressions. Insofar as there is any lack of precision or gaps between events we cannot fill, this is not due to the fact that early impressions have become fuzzy or hazy and are fading. It is simply due to the fact that our memory has to be very selective and that most impressions cannot be recalled. We can, for example, recall the face of a school friend, but not her name. This does not mean that we only recall her dimly. The face we recall is as fresh in our mind as the mirror image of our own face. The name we cannot recall is simply absent, but not dim or shadowy, and if, as often happens, it lies on the tip of your tongue, when it suddenly leaps to mind, it is as clear as the face itself. The human nervous system has no ability to pass on its aging to its contents. It is like a store, the walls and roof of which are decaying but the contents of which remain as fresh as on the day they were put there. The nervous system does not allow patina to grow on its content. I speak of ability because the failure of memories to acquire age and to age with time is a distinct disability First, the function of the nervous system is to make sure that most things that happen to us are not remembered. Memory has to be extremely selective, otherwise we could never concentrate on any task at hand. If we were able to recall everything, we would be very poorly adapted. Second, the purpose of the selective retention of some memories and not all memories is clearly adaptive. It helps us to establish the continuity of events in relation to a self and makes the very formation of the notion of self possible. Our sense of personal self is wholly wound up with the memories we have. If we had none or had others than we actually do have, or if we had an infinite and indiscriminate number, we would simply be a different person or no person at all. One often wonders then what the optimum amount of memory necessary for a good feel of selfhood might be. Too little is destructive; too much, a handicap. Who knows what amount would be right? Third, a certain power of retention is crucial for our ability to learn. Nonhuman animals are born with quite explicit programs for survival

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and their need to learn is very moderate. Human beings also are born with such programs, but these programs are more limited and less explicit, while our human capacity for memory is very large. Hence, we can learn on the basis of these programs. Clearly, the ability to learn is an advantage and it does depend on a corresponding ability to discard memories. But finally, in this survey, we come to the great and possibly crippling disability. Such memories as we have and need do not age. They are there, fresh when recalled, as fresh as on the day of their first creation. Mercifully, though fresh when recalled, they are not always recalled and are, often enough, extremely difficult to recall. But when they are recalled, and being fresh when they are, they populate our mind and attention as if nothing had happened since the first day on which they had been laid down. When not recalled, they are still there, still fresh and alive and populous though we do not actually know it. Unconscious, they are not dormant and inoperative like cripples or wilted flowers. They are, on the contrary, even when unconscious and seemingly forgotten, lively and active, keeping the high state of their very first day and, though forgotten, they bubble and trouble us actively as if they were not forgotten. If our nervous system had the ability to wilt them even as the nervous system itself wilts as we grow old, the causal efficacy of the memories would diminish and we could all look forward to a less troubled and much more serene old age. As things are, we suffer, as Freud once put it, from memories. Happiness, he said in another place, consists in the fulfilment of a prehistoric wish. That is, he continued, why money never brings happiness.9 Money was never part of a prehistoric wish. Proust put it in a slightly different way True paradise, he wrote, is the paradise we have lost. Happiness occurs when such a lost paradise is recovered.10 Both men were intensely sensitive to the operativeness of memories in the present and linked the loss of happiness with the loss of memories. Nevertheless, Freud and Proust interpreted these facts about memory in diametrically opposite ways. In surveying one's memories in the equality of their vividness, one must come to the conclusion that they are all there simultaneously, acting and interacting regardless of the moments in time at which they were laid down. This simultaneity obliges us to believe that even those we cannot for the moment recall are there and present, all at the same time. Try the experiment in reverse. If one surveys one's memories, it is impossible to order them in a time sequence on the grounds that some are more faded than others. If one wants to order them chronologically and has nothing but the memories themselves to go by, one encounters considerable difficulty, because one can do so only with outside help; that is, for example, with the extra knowledge that a

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memory of an event in which one is a child must logically and biologically have preceded a memory of an event in which one is an adolescent. But left to themselves, without such or similar extra knowledge, the two memories are equally vivid and the events they are memories of appear to have been simultaneous. All this indicates that our minds are, in reality, spatial arrangements. Though our nervous system is full of memories, all memories, no matter at what time they originated, are simultaneously present in it. Being simultaneously present, it is not difficult to see how they can interact and affect one another. Confronted with this situation, Proust remained completely sober and matter of fact. He used almost no interpretation at all and reported what the experiences obliged him to believe. Such a finding comes as a surprise given the sensual evocations generated by his prose style. It is nevertheless a correct finding. When Proust realized that memories never fade but remain active and efficient in our present mind regardless whether we can actually recall them or not, he realized that our sense of frustration and our feelings of mediocrity, of mortality, and contingency must come from the fact that something has come between these memories and our present state of mind. He reasoned that the element which has come between them is the awareness of the passage of time. If we have a memory, be it a happy one like the love of a mother or an unhappy one like the infidelities of an Albertine or a neutral one like the taste of a morsel of Madeleine soaked in tea, and allow the passing of time to create the illusion that it is separated from us and that, contrary to its causal operation in the present, it belongs to the distant past, we become unhappy and oppressed by our mortality. As well we might, for our mental life, when this process takes place, is in the grip of a delusion; that is, in the grip of the delusion that these very real and unfaded memories are in the past, are gone forever, and are lost and no longer real. Proust diagnosed this delusion as the root of unhappiness and, more precisely, as the root of that unhappiness which dogged his entire life. His asthma, he was aware, was somehow linked to this kind of unhappiness. This feeling of mortality and mediocrity derived from his sense of loss. The memory, to be sure, was not lost at all. It only seemed lost because he had taken the passage of time too realistically and too literally and thus appeared to be separated in time from events which he remembered or could have remembered as if they had happened yesterday, when he was not at all separated from them. Proust's realism consisted of the realization that all the events of the past are present simultaneously in his present mind and that it is a mistake to believe that time has elapsed or passed and come between one's present mind and one's past mind. The fact that these memories

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are unfaded, whether recalled or not, whether remembered or forgotten, is evidence of the fact that they are in reality not separated from each other or from the present state of mind by the passing of time. Proust accepted the straight experience that our mind or the parts of our mind are a spatial, not a temporal, arrangement. There came over me a feeling of profound fatigue at the realization that all this long stretch of time not only had been uninterruptedly lived, thought, secreted by me, that it was my life, my very self, but also that I must, every minute of my life, keep it closely by me, that it upheld me, that I was perched on its dizzying summit, that I could not move without carrying it about with me. The date when I heard the sound—so distant and yet so deep within me—of the little bell in the garden of Combray was a landmark I did not know I had available in this enormous dimension of time. My head swam to see so many years below me, and yet within me, as if I were thousands of leagues in height.11 The memories, Proust realistically declares, are "inside" and, insofar as they are extended, their extension is purely spatial; that is, "thousands of leagues in height," all present at the same time. In this view of our mental life, the unhappiness from which we are seeking to be cured is pushed back or diminished and might even disappear if by a sudden, often involuntary, association an event w e have forgotten is recalled. At the moment of recall the imagined time sequence disappears and the past ceases to be the past: At such a moment the mind is aware of its essentially purely spatial extension. Against all expectations aroused by the prose style employed by him, Freud did not abide with the facts of experience as Proust did, but forced these experiences into a vastly intricate and sophisticated scheme of interpretation. Although Freud's knowledge of literature and history w a s as rich and varied as Proust's, Freud had a thorough and systematic scientific education. The philosophy of nature he h a d learnt from his teachers, such as Brentano and Meynert, is too well k n o w n to need further description. One w a y or another, Freud was imbued with the conviction that scientific knowledge meant determinism and that the tracking d o w n of causal, deterministic relationships was the essence of science. He w a s not a materialist, but he was a determinist. This philosophy of nature prompted his earliest Project for a Scientific Psychology of 1895, which was, as Karl Pribram, a modern neuroscientist has put it, a "psychology for neurologists." 12 In this work, Freud planned to account for mental events in terms of neuronal occurrences without being a materialistic reductionist. The task was formidable and the ambition prodigious. After an initial sketch which shows all the traces of the intellectual euphoria of a pioneering discovery, Freud abandoned

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the plan and never took it up again. However, as numerous biographers and historians of science have since pointed out, Freud never rid himself of the basic determinism which had informed his grand Project. The abandonment of the Project almost completely coincided with an epoch-making discovery made by Freud: that imagined events can be as traumatic as events which have actually taken place. In a sense, Freud showed real genius when instead of turning his back on this fantastic idea, he devoted the rest of his life to explaining it. At that time in the history of ideas, any sane person would have dismissed the idea as absurd. When Joseph Breuer, his earliest associate and collaborator, had come up against a similar suggestion, he abandoned the study of psychology and broke with Freud. From that time on, Breuer never ceased to call Freud a man given to fantasies. Freud did not appear to have to take special care with the prose he wrote to hide his powers of imagination. The robust German prose he penned with the unflinching certainty of good logic coupled to what he considered simple clinical observation seems to have come naturally to him and would have made him a master of German style even if he had never become a master of anything else. But appearances can be misleading: Whether fantasies or imaginations, Freud subjected his studies of memory to a highly speculative interpretation and proceeded to deal with them in a poetic manner which Proust had either studiously eschewed or, more likely, which had never crossed his realistic mind with its powers for precise observation. If memories of past events are vividly present in our minds and do not fade but are causally operative here and now, no matter how long ago they were laid down in the mind, Freud reasoned that if they trouble us, they must be very unpleasant memories, memories of forbidden wishes, memories of intolerable injuries, or memories of unbearable frustrations. Unlike Proust, he did not suggest that they were troublesome here and now because we imagine that we are separated from them by the passage of time. On the contrary, Freud surmised that they were indeed matters of the past and separated from us by the lapse of time, and that they were troublesome and caused unhappiness because they were memories of events which could not be assimilated to and incorporated into the social configurations in which we were living. The injury, in other words, lay in the past. It simply was operative either overtly or covertly in the present. It was, however, irremediably separated from us by the span of time which had elapsed since the occurrence of the events in question. And this is the point where the poetic speculation comes in. Freud invited us to believe that events could be causally operative across a span of time: "A humiliation that was experienced thirty years ago acts exactly like a fresh one through-

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out one's life."13 It was a little like Newton's idea that there can be instantaneous action at a distance, as when he suggested that the "force" of gravity attracts the earth to the sun instantaneously over the vast distance which separates the earth from the sun. More realistically, Einstein was to show that such "forces" cannot exist because, if they did, they would have to be presumed to move with a speed faster than light. Like Newton, Freud believed that causal forces work over long distances and he saw nothing fantastic in the notion that something that had occurred a long time ago should be causally efficient in the present. In order to make this idea plausible and convincing, one would have to introduce a lot of neurology far beyond our present state of knowledge of the behavior of the nervous system. Freud believed that his psychology would cease to be scientific unless it adhered strictly to determinism. The postulation that the events the memories of which we are troubled by remain in the past and that we are separated from them by the passage of time was less difficult to swallow than the notion that mental events are not causally related to each other and that, in the sphere of the mind, physical determinism plays an insignificant role. In order to save determinism, Freud held fast to the notion that the memories which troubled us were memories of events which were in the past. If we wanted not to be troubled, we could seek a cure by feeling our way down the track of time through free associations until we were able to recall the unpleasant memory. The reality of the passage of time was inexorable and adamant. At no stage in the curing process could the past ever become the present. Freud did not imagine that the illusion that time has passed was the root of unhappiness or trouble. The root of unpleasant trouble was the unpleasantness of the event stored in our memory, not the unpleasantness of the awareness that the event seemed lost. If the mind is a spatial arrangement, one has to account for the appearance of time; that is, for the appearance of the idea that some of the events in our mind are memories of events which have taken place a long time ago. Proust knew perfectly well that we forget some events and that, insofar as we forget them, they are, though present, like gaps in our mind. Such oblivion, he reasoned, creates gaps in the space of the mind and, in creating thus a sense of loss, causes the impression that time has passed and that the events which have fallen victim to oblivion are events which are in the past. What is lost, it now seems, is "in the past." Oblivion and the gaps it creates in the space of the mind cause the illusion that some events are not remembered because they are in the distant past. Our sense of time is parasitic on the appearance of gaps in the space of mind. It is a special, if faulty, interpretation of the nature of those gaps.

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Against this view that time was parasitic on certain occurrences in the space of mind, Freud prided himself of a tough-minded realism. All events are and always remain time sequential. Their chronological order is ineradicable. Such a view, I would argue, is rather unrealistic in view of the purely spatial extension of the mind. If time sequentiality were really ineradicable, older memories would be more faded than recent ones and, eventually, all memories would fade away completely and lose their causal efficacy to trouble or console us, as the case may be. Nevertheless, it is a view which is highly imaginative and borders on the fantastic. If one wants to accept it, one has to force oneself to make a real leap of the imagination from the reality of spatial extension, of which we know through our experience of our own body as something that occupies space, into the imaginary world of temporal extension, of which we can have no direct experience at all and of which we can know only, as Proust bore witness, if we misinterpret the gaps which oblivion causes to occur in the spaces of our minds. Freud, in a sense, can be said to have stood Proust on his head. Instead of taking the spatial extension of mental events as the given reality and instead of looking upon the temporal distance of mental events from each other as a misreading of the spatial gaps caused by oblivion, Freud took the temporal sequence in which mental events were ordered as the naturally given fact and accounted for the action of past events in the present by assuming or imagining long-distance causality. In Freud's view, the empty spaces in our minds are not just caused by oblivion. They are to a large extent caused by selective repression. Oblivion can affect any events at all. Selective repression is something quite different. It singles out certain events and makes sure they are "forgotten." Since in Freud's view all events come and remain in a time sequence, these gaps are not the cause of our impression that time passes. Time, in Freud's view, would pass anyway, even if no repression or forgetting had occurred. In Freud's world there is always a sense of loss, whether repression takes place or not. In taking the temporal extension as primary, Freud, as argued, stood Proust on his head. The history of ideas knows of at least one other case in which a thinker has stood another thinker on his head. One need not always assume that such an athletic feat invariably results in more realism. In Freud's case, as in the even more well known case of Marx, the reversal led to less, not more, realism. However this may be, where Proust held fast to the spatial extension of the mind and diagnosed the appearance of a temporal extension as a delusion, albeit a very natural delusion, Freud began with the temporal extension and, in holding fast to it, believed that events can causally influence one another over long periods of time. One could also say that the idea that there is action at a distance

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of events upon one another boils down to a transformation of the temporal sequence of events into a spatial simultaneity of events. For insofar as events causally influence one another, they can be presumed to be occurring simultaneously. For Proust, then, mind was a spatial extension which assumed, misleadingly the guise of a temporal extension. For Freud, mental events were naturally situated in chronological order but often tended to behave as if they were spatially contiguous. In the last analysis, the difference between Proust's realism and Freud's poetic speculation designed to save determinism in psychology turns upon the difference between Proust's involuntary memory and Freud's therapy by free association. In Proust's thought, the troublemaker is the imagined passage of time. The most efficient way of overcoming the delusion that time has passed and that the past is irretrievably lost is the phenomenon of involuntary memory which allows us at one sudden snap to recall something which we appear to have forgotten. At that snap, the delusion that time has passed and that anything has been lost ceases. The forgotten event comes back into the mind and sits there as bright and vivid as it ever was, no matter how long ago: The mind's spatial integrity is restored. As a result, a sudden happiness floods over us because we realize that our sense of loss was unjustified. When involuntary memory comes into play we realize that we have not lost anything and that our sense of loss was misplaced. To repeat, the trouble was caused by the illusion that time had passed. When this illusion goes, unhappiness ceases and we are cured. All this follows without much speculation or interpretation from the initial observation that when we do recall anything at all we recall it clearly and vividly and that, insofar as there is recall, what is being recalled is here and now and all events in our life, no matter when they happened on the time scale, are simultaneously present in our mind. Given this ultimate simultaneity, the passing of time, whatever it might mean in the world of physics, is of no ultimate consequence in the world of our minds. If it is believed to be, it will cause unhappiness. Occasions of involuntary memory are the therapy which brings us back to a realistic assessment that our sense of loss is unjustified. When time was regained, Proust literally immolated himself and thus proved that he really believed what he said. Admirers of Proust tend to fail to grasp the significance of Proust's near suicide, of his self-sacrificial death. For here again, the style is misleading. In this case it is not the prose style which misleads, but the lifestyle. Proust was spoiled and selfindulgent. He was a spendthrift, a snob, a playboy, and a flaneur, and devoted an extraordinary amount of time and money and effort on frivolous pleasures. People who are looking at the style in which he lived must remain puzzled by the manner of his death. The manner of

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his death was not in the style of his life any more than the realism of his thought was in the style of his prose. By contrast, Freud's method of free association is a very different matter. It is a slow and laborious process induced by the suggestion of the therapist who sits behind the patient and nudges the patient along. The nudging is not done by suggesting what the next "free" association ought to be, but by suggesting what it might mean in the context of the other free associations. Freud himself, of course, provided a very elaborate theoretical framework as to what a corpus of free associations might mean. Somewhere, in this theory, they lead back to an Oedipus complex, to a seduction or an imagined and wished seduction and to incestuous desires. This is not the place to discuss the justification for the theoretical superstructure. It is clear, however, that where involuntary memory comes unpredictably and works instantaneously, the process of free association is long and labored. Psychologically, one might argue, a moment of involuntary memory may not be as spontaneous and as unpredictable as Proust would have it. There may well be a certain similarity between free associations and involuntary memory. The real difference between the two techniques lies in the fact that in involuntary memory the spurious passage of time is suddenly eliminated: "[Involuntary] memory, by introducing the past into the present without modification, as though it were the present, eliminates precisely that great Time-dimension in accordance with which life is realized."14 This is where the realism of the technique lies. If those memories we can recall are all equally vivid in our mind no matter how far the events they are memories of are separated from the present, then the suggestion that in involuntary memory the span of time which separates the present from the alleged and spurious past is eliminated is a realistic one. It is a suggestion which really takes account of the facts as they are; or, lest this way of putting it smack of positivism, it takes account of the way we actually experience memories. Free association, even granted that involuntary memory is a bit more voluntary than Proust allows, is an entirely different technique because it proceeds on the assumption that the passage of time is real, inexorable, and unalterable. Free association works because one assumes that the events which have caused the memories are forever nailed to certain points in time and that whatever trouble they are causing us in the present, they are causing that trouble across a span of time through some mysterious force. Free association is a technique which makes us trace our way back to a distant past. If anything, it helps us to accept the past as the past and to accept that what is gone is gone. It is a bit like a historical investigation, in which we begin with the search for a document because we have detected what we suspect to be a modern

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consequence of a past event. We then look for the original document of that event in a modern archive and then laboriously reconstruct by hermeneutic methods, sphragistics, and diplomatics the original meaning of the text until we finally feel assured that we have reached the event recorded in the document—always knowing that the event is past and remains past and forever glued to the precise point in time at which it occurred. What is more, it remains so glued whether we ever find our way back to it or not, and from there it will exercise its troubling influence on the present because it was and only because it was in itself a troubling event. In this scheme of things, time is taken to be ineradicable, and the ineradicability of the passing of time it not considered in itself a cause of disturbances. Memories disturb us because they are memories of disturbing events. They do not disturb us simply because we imagine that they are of events which we have lost forever. Ultimately, then, the difference between involuntary memory and free association—two techniques devised to lead us back to time lost—lies in the two different conceptions of time. Although Proust's style, not without justification, has always been taken to be that of the speculative, self-indulgent, oversensitive spinner of fantasies and Freud's style is considered, rightly, to be an exemplar of scientific probity and unadorned directness, I hope to have shown that it was Proust, not Freud, who stuck to the facts and provided a realistic psychology. Freud, on the other hand, forced himself along a path of scientistic self-misunderstanding, as explained in Chapter 3, to present us with a fairly far-fetched speculation about the reason why memories of past events remain to trouble us in the present. I am saying "far-fetched" advisedly, for Freud's view of memory and how memory operates in the present is not compatible with the theory proposed in Chapter 1 that states of mind are verbal identifications of neuronally induced somatic markers. I would, instead, draw attention to Steven Rose's account of the making of memory, which bears out the peculiarly hypothetical relationship between neuronal events and their somatic markers and verbal labels.15 Memory, Rose explains, is laid down by specific changes in the properties of specific cells of the central nervous system. These changes can be measured morphologically, dynamically, biochemically, and physiologically. They are necessary for any recall and for retrievability (i.e., for remembering). But if the recall is more than an animal reflex action, as it is in human beings who can remember thoughts or smells or feels without resorting to behavior, then these changes in the cells of the central nervous system are not sufficient. They have to be interpreted by hypothetically attributed labels which are themselves memories laid down by different experiences in different sets of cells.

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These two systems of cells have to come together to produce a human form of remembering. But since the two systems have different origins, the coming together is fortuitous, not causal. In most cases, there are many different ways in which they can come together. Animals who have no language cannot interpret, or, to use E. Tulving's term, cannot "ecphorize."16 The neural engram, Tulving suggests—and this is entirely consistent with the present theory that neurons are silent and do not contain sufficient information to lead causally to verbal labels which describe them—is an "unfinished thought about memory, at best only one half of the story of memory" 17 The engram, in other words, has to be activated. Rose states that we have come to understand a lot about learning (i.e., how the engram is made or laid down).18 But in order to understand that we have memories and can remember what we have learned or gone through, we have to focus on the process of retrieval. If there is loss of memory or if what we have been through is difficult of access, we say we are at a loss for words. It is not so much that the engram is locked away in a hidden place or out of sight, but that we cannot activate it because we cannot connect it to the language memory system which was learned or laid down in a different way. When access becomes possible and the engram is ecphorized, we remember. But we must keep in mind that what we remember is a hypothetical activation of the original engram, not an automatic retrieval. One and the same engram could therefore be retrieved—"reconstructed" would be a better word—in different ways at different times. Retrieval is as tentative as the identification of a mood or a somatic marker as an emotion or a state of mind. But this is not all. If we distinguish between the silent raw feel of the marker and the eloquent labelling of that feel, something happens which escaped the sharp eye of Freud. In spite of the fact that he was aware that word and thing do not come as undissolvable couplets, and although he had written in his The Unconscious "what we called the conscious presentation of the object can... be split up into the presentation of the word and the presentation of the thing," he did not grasp the implication of this realization.19 If there is recall, the feel and the manufactured label can come up separately, for they are not glued together. It may of course be possible to recall how they were combined many years ago, but it is equally possible for one to be recalled without the other. A label that was used years ago may come up in cold blood, so to speak, without the feel it used to be attached to in the past; or, vice versa, a feel may come back, but without the label we used to attribute to it. And, what is even more troublesome, a label may come up with a feel that was not attached to it at the time it was verbally construed or

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a feel may come up attached to a label that was used at a different time. When people speak of recovered memory, they ought to be mindful of the many misleading possibilities and of how easy it is for these combinations to mislead as to what had actually happened many years ago; that is, how readily recovered memories are as often as not combinations of feels and of recovered labels that were not so combined many years ago. Such errors of recombination are less likely to occur in Proust's involuntary memory than in Freud's voluntary or forced memory, forced to our attention by free association. The distinction between Proust's involuntary memory and Freud's voluntary memory is indeed crucial. Here too, Proust was more hard-nosed than Freud. In involuntary memory it is first of all the raw feel that is retrieved and the label that used to be attached to it is more likely to be dragged up with it. In voluntary memory, by contrast, one starts with a label and what is retrieved is a label that has been forgotten. The chance that the specific feel that used to be attached to the label at the time the label was forgotten (i.e., was repressed?) will come up with it is very small. What is retrieved, more likely, is an empty label, devoid of the feel it used to be attached to and which was interpreted by it. The feel that adheres to such an empty label is more likely to be a feel which is in the present, at the moment of recall. Hence, the retrieved label, being by itself devoid of sensuous feel, may be no guide to the repressed past experience at all. Let us return briefly to Tulving's concept of ecphorization. He writes Ecphoric memory is never "right" or "wrong"; it is simply what it is at any given time: a state of the system determined by a number of other components of the system. The fact that ecphoric information is only similar to, but not identical with the original engram, and the fact that the similarity may vary over a wide range, provides the basis for (a) veridical remembering, as determined by a psychologist, using his own criteria; (b) distortions of memory, where the individual "remembers" something that in fact did not happen, or "remembers" a component of a remembered event incorrectly; and (c) forgetting, a change in "veridical" remembering over time, as a result of the recording of the engram and possibly a changed (semantic) interpretation of the retrieval cue.20

It cannot be overstressed, if this description of what is going on in retrieval is correct, that "veridical remembering"—the only kind that can lay a claim to be truthful—is something that has to be "determined by the psychologist using his own criteria." A mere avowal by the subject, no matter how self-certain it appears to the subject, will not do. Whichever way we look at it, a "memory . . . is not some passive inscription of data on the wax tablet or silicon chips of the brain."21

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One cannot remember events that happened before one was able to name them. Suppose the feel or the somatic marker should reoccur, as well it might, for neuronal pathways become fixed and habituated. When it does reoccur, unnamed or unlabelled, one cannot be sure that it is the marker that had occurred in the past. Even if it is the same, one cannot be sure that it is indeed the feel, unlabelled as it was and before the reoccurrence was given a label, that had occurred earlier. So, to be sure that the marker that is recovered is the same marker, one would have to be sure that the name one is giving it now is the same as the name that was given to it in the past. But since the names are never firmly attached to the feels, one could easily and readily misremember; that is, recall a name which had not, at the time, been given to the feel. Can you be sure, Wittgenstein asked, "that this is the correct translation of your wordless thought into words?"22 It may one day be possible to ascertain whether neurologically determinable feels are identical with earlier ones; that is, whether certain given pathways persist and can be reactivated and, so, remembered. But since verbal labels add information to what is neurologically determinable, there is no telling whether a recalled labelled pathway is or is not identical with such a recoverable raw and uninterpreted pathway or circuit. In all honesty, I have to conclude these thoughts on the misleading evocations of the senses in the prose style of two of the greatest writers of our century with a sobering reflection. If Proust was the great realist in his thought, Freud showed himself the great realist as far as reasonable expectations are concerned. Proust's great work ends on an optimistic and happy note—not light-hearted, foolhardy happiness, but some confident optimism. Provided I can live long enough, he is telling the reader, to make of all I have seen and discovered a work of art, some task will have been accomplished. Proust had faith in the transcendent and redeeming power of the work of art. His faith may well have been justified, but faith it was nevertheless. By comparison, Freud revealed himself as both a realist and a pessimist, which amounts to saying that a pessimist is a well-informed optimist. All psychoanalysis can hope to accomplish, Freud wrote, is to transform screaming hysteria into common or garden misery. There is room for a lot of subtle analysis here. His great discovery made, Proust was quite euphoric in his enthusiasm for the great work of art and described its achievements in the superlative terms of a man who imagines he has achieved omnipotence, not to mention immortality Freud, by contrast, kept his feet on the ground and his head out of such clouds. He always described both omnipotence and immortality as childish delusions. But if we are to take the quotation about Goethe and the success of children who are secure in the love of their mothers,

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which I have chosen as a motto of this chapter, seriously, then we must believe that even Freud supposed that a man who has been his mother's "undisputed darling" might achieve omnipotence and, if not omnipotence, success. There is no evidence from Freud's own life that the basis for Freud's success and confidence was laid in this particular way by his mother. Freud might therefore have had good reason for holding that omnipotence and immortality are suspect. By the same Freudian token, however, the foundations for Proust's success could well have been laid by his mother and Proust's unimpeded access to his mother when he was young might not only indicate that Freud was wrong in thinking that there is only one way in which an Oedipal situation can be resolved successfully, but also wrong in his unconditional rejection of omnipotence and immortality. If Proust's experience is anything to go by, the fact that he was his mother's "undisputed darling," as the second motto I have chosen declares, as well as the fact that eventually his father permitted him unimpeded access to his mother, show that Freud's blanket pessimism might have been unjustified and that Proust's own euphoria at his success might be capable of a perfectly plausible psychological explanation. An Oedipus complex and its successful resolution may, as Freud taught, lead to a life in which a man can work and love. But an Oedipal desire not resolved but freely indulged in may, as Proust demonstrated, lead to artistic grandeur. Since Freud is considered the great realist, one must naturally think of a Freudian interpretation of Proust. To my knowledge such work has never been done systematically, in spite of the fact that the invitation is so obvious and the material so strikingly ready to hand. Perhaps it is too obvious for anybody ever to have carried it out. Proust confessed in all but so many words to a deep incestuous relationship with his mother and described in a famous passage how his father, after many attempts to resist the boy, abdicated and encouraged the mother to indulge her son.23 For the rest of his life, Proust was a living example of a man without super-ego, without will power and provided in his own person a long and detailed description of what Freud said would happen to boys who fail to transform their Oedipal desire into a conscience. Proust's life—and it does not matter whether we take our material from George D. Painter's masterly biography or from Proust's own autobiographical work—is a walking example of Freudian theory24 A walking example, that is, but for one crucial fact. Unlike the men who, in Freud's view, fail to work successfully through their Oedipal desires, Proust by indulging them fully became one of the greatest creative artists of the twentieth century. In this one crucial respect, Proust's achievement gave the lie to Freud. In the manner of his death, as well

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as by his determination to seclude himself in order to write his great work, Proust also displayed a will power which, by Freudian standards, he ought not to have had. But all in all, one could readily consider Proust's novel an epic of unresolved Oedipal conflict. In view of this striking deficiency of Freudian theory about Proust, I would like to conclude by doing something which is neither obvious nor conventionally commendable. Convention suggests that Freudian psychological science can help us to account for Proust and the same convention makes us shrink from the suggestion that the ideas of an idiosyncratic and self-indulgent poet can be used to account for the ideas and practice of a Freud. A Freudian interpretation of Proust is an obvious possibility. A Proustian interpretation of Freud might seem an enormity. There is clearly no space now to present such an interpretation in any detail or depth. But given my argument and given the deficiency of any Freudian interpretation of Proust, it must seem plausible to suggest that a Proustian interpretation of Freud must be helpful. The basic strategy of such an interpretation would have to be the suggestion that when Freud said that neurotic people suffer from memories, he did not mean so much as that they are suffering from specific memories, the ability of which to cause suffering would require a lot of special explanation, but that they are, at bottom, suffering from a sense of loss. Dora or the Rat Man may not have been troubled because they were or were not seduced by the person they had wished or feared to be seduced by. They may have been suffering from the fact that as adults they were now out of touch with the wish or the fear. Insofar as therapy is helpful in such cases, it does not consist of the actual historical reconstruction of what it was that had happened to them, but of the fact that the work of free association works a little bit like involuntary memory. Suddenly, at one point in the therapy, time lost is regained. Whatever the patient imagines to be free from, his newly gained strength and contentment and confidence may come, as Proust suggested, from the fact that what appeared as the lost past is no longer either lost or past. The reason why our mortality oppresses us and demoralizes us is that we live with a sense of loss as time goes by. Our neurotic disturbances, if we take Proust rather than Freud as our guide, do not come from any specific event which happened in time, but from the mere fact that time itself appears to have passed, no matter what exactly took place in it; and from the fact that oblivion creates in the space of our mind gaps which appear to be moments of time we have lost. If involuntary memory abolishes that sense of loss, it will also eliminate the demoralizing and enervating mediocrity that goes with

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it. If one is looking for therapy in this vale of tears, there is a lot to be gained from an imitation of Proust. I would like to suggest that such effectiveness as Freudian therapy may have can be explained better in Proustian terms than in Freudian: "An exquisite pleasure h a d invaded m y senses . . . and at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory. . . . I had ceased n o w to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal." 25 NOTES 1. Sigmund Freud, "Eine Kindheitserinnerung aus Dichtung und Wahrheit," Imago 5, 2 (1917): 57. Trans. C. J. M. Hubback in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955-1964), 17:15 (hereafter cited as S.E.). 2. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 625; The Sweet Cheat Gone, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944), 289-290. 3. S.E., 14: 88-89. 4. M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 9, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 147. 5. M. Bowie, Freud, Lacan, and Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 6. "Automatisme ambulatoire chez un hysterique," Bulletin Medical 4 (1890): 107-108. 7. S.E., 18:63. 8. Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. Stephen Hudson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944), 215. 9. S.E., 11:16. 10. Proust, Time Regained, 215. 11. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 2, trans. F. A. Blossom (New York: Random House, 1927), 1123. Stephen Hudson's translation of this passage in Proust, Time Regained (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944), 432-433, is incorrect. The original is in Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 1047. 12. K. H. Pribram and M. M. Gill, Freud's Project Reassessed (London: Hutchinson, 1976), 10,14. 13. S.E.,5:578. 14. Proust, Time Regained, 413-414. 15. Steven Rose, The Making of Memory (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1993), 287f. 16. See, for example, "Interview with Endel Tulving," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 3 (1991): 89-94. 17. Ibid., and E. Tulving, "Memory Research Is Not a Zero-Sum Game," American Psychologist 46 (1991): 94. Cf. also A. Oliverio and C. Castellano, "La modulazione della memoria," Le Scienze 333 (1996): 62-70. 18. Rose, Making of Memory, 319.

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19. S.E., 14:201. 20. Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 182-183. 21. Rose, Making of Memory, 320. 22. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 342. 23. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922), 46-47. 24. George D. Painter, Marcel Proust (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959). 25. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1966), Vol. 1, 58.

5 The Pure Pursuit of Impure Reason

PSYCHOLOGICAL INDETERMINISM If I complain of pains in the abdomen, a doctor might diagnose them as due to appendicitis. If a surgeon then removes the appendix and the pain disappears, one will rationally conclude that the diagnosis had been correct and that the pain had in fact been caused by an inflamed appendix. One might, however, surmise that the appendix had not been inflamed, and that the pain had been psychosomatic or been caused by something else. The mere cessation of the pain is not necessarily proof that the diagnosis had been correct and that the surgeon had good cause to remove the appendix. Admittedly, there is a circularity in the procedure and the conclusion. However, the matter need not rest there. Once the appendix is out, it can be sent to a laboratory and an independent pathological test can confirm that the appendix had indeed been inflamed. The laboratory test will confirm or disconfirm the diagnosis. The correctness of the diagnosis does not depend exclusively on the cessation of the pain. In the case of a state of mind, a psychological discomfort or neurosis, the outside laboratory test is not available. When pressed by discomfort, one might seek the advice of a psychologist or a psychoanalyst. He or she will make a diagnosis, with or without the patient's help, and give either good advice or provide an explanation of how the neurosis was caused or help the patient to restructure his or her states of mind or suggest that certain states of the patient's mind had been misconstrued by the patient—in which case a straight suggestion of how

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they might be reconstrued could bring relief. Whichever of these procedures is used, if there is relief, the matter must rest there. It is not possible to send a state of mind to a laboratory and get it tested independently so that one can tell whether the diagnosis and the remedy for it were "correct"; nor is it possible to tell whether the relief was accidental, the result of a remission, temporary or permanent, or the result of mere hypnotic suggestion. Mental states or mental states uncomfortable enough to warrant to be called diseases of the mind are not like appendicitis. In the end, with states of mind, comfortable or uncomfortable as they may be, there is nothing but circularity, because there is no independent test available as to whether the diagnosis or any treatment was correct or not. As was observed in Chapter 3, for psychology there is no second script to see whether the first script corresponds to it. Adolf Griinbaum, in his The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, has made this difference between ordinary physical medicine and psychoanalysis the cornerstone of his case against Freud.1 Griinbaum argues, mistakenly, as I have shown in Chapter 3, that while many of Freud's theories are falsifiable and therefore "scientific," the ultimate failure of Freudian psychoanalysis lies in the exclusive circularity of his diagnostic procedure. The clinical method in which a patient is psychoanalyzed is invariably suggestive and placibogenic. Sooner or later the patient will agree that he or she is better and Freud will then claim that his diagnosis of the neurosis was correct. There can be no independent check. The cause that has been diagnosed and the cure will "tally." This, Griinbaum contends, is not a scientific procedure. Psychoanalysis is therefore a discipline which cannot test its theories by its own method. On the face of it, this reads like a very damning and final indictment of Freud and Freudian procedures. However, there is a crucial aspect of the matter which Griinbaum has completely overlooked. What Griinbaum is saying about Freud applies with equal force and finality to all psychological reasoning. Psychological reasoning is in reality the manufacture of eloquence about something. But that "something" are the somatic markers or the moods generated by neurons which are completely silent and have no labels attached to them. The eloquence has to be manufactured, for we cannot do without it. Further, it has to be manufactured because the moods and markers it interprets do not carry much information and certainly not enough information to allow either the patient or any outside observer, therapist, or counsellor to check whether any particular piece of manufacture is correct or not. For this reason, Griinbaum's analysis of circularity, though correct, is beside the point, for it certainly is not peculiar to Freudian psychology and there is nothing we can do about it, because we do need psychol-

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ogy The hard truth about psychology is that there are no hard facts, and, since all psychological discourse is a kind of manufacture, somebody has to persuade himself or herself or somebody else that a certain manufactured article is the "truth" about certain states of mind. Persuasion and suggestion and the lack of confidence and the uncertainty that must inevitably go with them is of the essence of all psychological reasoning. Suggestion, including placebogenic suggestion, is not only widespread in depth psychology, but is the universal and essential feature of all psychological reasoning. Freud, it has to be faced, neither discovered nor invented the power of suggestion. But he did exploit it to the full, as I shall argue presently, and was of the opinion that what he was doing to his patients was working effectively for reasons other than the power of suggestion. He thought that he had discovered the truth about their states of mind and that if they resisted that truth they were doing so because they themselves were unconscious of the real content of their states of mind, content which was what Freud said it was. Freud was never brought face to face with the flaw in his own reasoning because the postulation of the unconscious provided a protective cover. In reality, such successes as he had were brought about by the power of suggestion. The moment the word "suggestion" is mentioned, the reader will suppose that it is proposed that there is something improper in psychology. But, as I said, the hard fact is that there must be suggestion and there cannot be anything else. This is why the pursuit of the impure reasoning that is the hallmark of psychology is perfectly "pure." If the argument of Chapter 1 that the relation between neuronally generated somatic markers and articulated states of mind is purely hypothetical is correct, it follows that any articulation of a state of mind, the manufacture of eloquence about the marker as illustrated in Chapter 2, has to be seen, in the first instance, as a form of autosuggestion. Since autosuggestion leaves doubts and is suspect because it is what one has suggested to oneself, it cries out for confirmation or modification from another person. It must, in the second instance, rely on or have recourse to suggestions made by other people. Autosuggestion and the ability to be open to suggestion by other people and our inevitable dependence on both lies at the heart of all psychological reasoning. Freud's critics betray a profound misunderstanding of psychology as such when they claim that it is only Freud's particular brand of psychological reasoning that is flawed by its reliance on suggestion and his patients' reliance on it. In all cases, the somatic markers we are aware of are no guide for identification and do not authorize any particular labelling. As a result, all identifications are hypothetical.

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It is not that one can be wrong in any one identification, but that any identification remains an uncertain hypothesis. If one says "I love you," the other may well doubt it. But, what is much worse, one may doubt it oneself. One can never know whether, in saying "I love you," one is sincere or not. One cannot read one's own mind any more than one can read other people's minds. That is, one can know what one is avowing, but one cannot know whether such an avowal is a suitable or adequate reference to one's somatic marker. John may doubt what Mary is saying about herself, but Mary too must be in doubt about what she is saying about herself. How can one gain confidence not only in what other people are avowing but in what oneself is avowing? It has been known for a very long time that whatever it is people are troubled by, when they can talk about it to somebody else they experience relief. This has been widely used for many centuries in the confessional practices of the Catholic Church and is, for that matter, a very common experience among people who are not Catholics and who do not use the formal confessional. The relief is usually enhanced when the person one is talking to is making a comment that one is well justified in one's identification of one's mind, or that one ought to change one's attitude, or that one is mistaken as to the causes of one's state of mind, be it comfortable or uncomfortable. The suggestion about the causes need not be right. Indeed, given the nature of the psyche, nobody can possibly ever know whether it is, because the neurons it refers to are silent. But if the suggestion is powerful or made by a friend one trusts or has some other kind of authority attached to it, it is very likely to be therapeutic, regardless whether the cause it suggests is the right cause or not. In a light vein, there is the old joke about the middleaged woman who consults a psychologist about a neurotic trouble she cannot get away from. She comes home and tells her friend with delight that she knows what caused the trouble: "He said that it is all because I used to be a child!" Obviously, the production of the "cause"—it is all because I used to be a child—is patently absurd or, at least, completely inadequate. But even with such inadequacy, there was relief. Freud had a great sense of humor and he might have laughed at this summary of the procedure, but he himself put it more circumspectly: "Interpretation" applies to something that one does to some single element of the material, such as an association or a parapraxis. But it is a "construction" when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has forgotten, in some such way as this: "Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. . . . Your feelings towards your mother became ambivalent, your father gained new importance for you" . . . and so on.2

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To drive home the point how suggestion operates as an essential part of psychological reasoning, let me quote a story from Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins. As the plot develops, Paula, one of the protagonists, had become more and more troubled and neurotic. Finally, when all her friends were in despair, she consulted a psychologist. She found almost instant relief because she had been told "When my brother died my childish jealousy gave rise to feelings of guilt, which explains my masochism in connection with Henri. I made myself a slave to that man; I agreed to give up all my personal success for him, I chose obscurity, dependence. Why? To redeem myself; so that through him my dead brother would eventually consent to absolve me." . . . Her friend who had been listening to her ... kept silent. [He]... was quite familiar with the kind of explanation Mardus had used; on occasion [he] . . . made use of similar ones.3 In other words, her friend was perfectly aware that here he was being confronted with a piece of freely manufactured eloquence and showed little surprise that Paula had swallowed the manufactured article, appropriated it to reconstruct her state of mind, and felt "cured." He knew it was a placebo. But then, in psychology there is nothing but placebos because the neuronally generated somatic markers are inchoate and any suggestion as to what they might mean, as long as it does not totally fly in their face, is a viable construction of their meaning. It is alleged and is a common and widespread misconception among psychologists that there are well-tried techniques for getting at the states of mind of people so that it is possible to tell whether an interpretation of the meaning of those states is true or not. But these techniques, though they sound both grand and subtle, are like a veil that is mercifully and self-interestedly drawn over the conditions of the psyche and its silent neurons. There is nothing there to be got at, nothing there to be found, but those techniques make it look as if there were. Any conclusion, for example, is preceded by ample listening to the patient's anamnesis, if any. There are observable patterns of association and of historical themes. One can watch a patient's nonverbal style of behavior and the correlation between types of events and the patient's responses to an interpretation of these events. One can process the patient's own observations and intuitions about himself. There is also a a number of minimally intrusive or suggestive analytic interventions, such as reflections, questions, and confrontations. Finally, there are a number of trial and error interpretations connecting current behaviors to current events and motives and current behavior and perceptions to events in the consulting room, including the psychologist's own behavior. During any of these processes, it is maintained, there is ample opportunity

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for the analysand to correct, revise, or reject the analyst's conceptions long before the proffering of a "complete" interpretation.4 I have no reason to doubt that any or all of these techniques are being employed scrupulously, but I have every reason to reject the contention that they can get at the real causes of neurosis or of any state of mind. There is the simplest of reasons: The state of mind in question does not exist qua state of mind. It only is present in the form of neuronaly generated markers. The rest is verbal interpretation and manufactured eloquence. There is no reason in the world why we should accord a privileged status to the eloquence manufactured by the patient and why there should be ultimate and final veracity in the eloquence produced by the patient so that when the psychologist discovers what the patient is saying, he or she knows it is a true and complete representation of those neuronal markers because the person who is having them says so. By the same token, there is no reason in the world why one should accord privileged status to any eloquence suggested by the therapist, a father confessor, a friend, or a counsellor. The patient is a "patient" precisely because he or she has come to doubt the truth of his or her introspection or intuition. The patient is lacking, as well he or she might, in confidence in his or her own manufactured eloquence. That eloquence is after all only what the patient proposes to himself or herself. There is no way in which the patient can check whether the proposal is valid. As a result, the troubled person becomes a patient listener and his or her confidence in what is being proposed is now greatly increased when the eloquence manufactured by the analyst is manufactured according to the well tried and publicly known techniques described. The reason why the patient is a patient and why he or she is troubled by neurotic symptoms that make him or her seek help is precisely that the eloquence he or she is in the habit of manufacturing is not "satisfactory" but disturbing. The psychic situation is precisely that there is only manufactured articles—some are manufactured by the person who has the neuronal markers and some are manufactured by outside observers. The psychologist who is in command of these techniques may inspire confidence and have, therefore, a greater power of suggestion than a person who has no such techniques at his or her disposal. These techniques must reinforce the power of suggestion by making the patient feel that he or she, together with the psychologist, is engaged on a voyage of discovery and is therefore likely to make him or her think that there are good reasons for consenting to the proposed eloquence, even though, in reality, the eloquent findings have been manufactured. That is all, for the rest is silence. None of these and no other even more subtle and ingenious techniques can provide an empirical warrant for

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the eloquence the psychologist is prepared to manufacture and confront the patient with. In reality, the psychologist is and remains at sea, and so is the patient. One has to depend, at least in the first instance, on autosuggestion even though it is a strictly do-it-yourself device. This is because there is not sufficient information in the somatic marker to authorize any one particular interpretation and dictate which of two conflicting and competing interpretations is to be preferred. A merely literal description of the marker—something like Baudelaire's lively disturbance in the base of the brain, for example—does not get anybody very far. And yet the marker is obtrusive and virulent and therefore cries out for a specific label. The absence of sufficient information forces us to depend, at least to start with, on guesses. Hence the widespread uncertainty which is such a vivid characteristic of all reasonable folk psychology. If uncertainty in folk psychology is reasonable and to be expected, there is also a curiously deleterious consequence of the absence of sufficient information in the marker. Psychological interpretations of the markers, if and when cultural constraints are lacking, are wildly anarchical. In the distant past, cultural constraints on interpretations have been operative. But in our modern world, in which enlightened psychologists are vying with other scientists to be scientific, psychologists are taking pride in their freedom from cultural constraints and traditions. This has led to an abundance of wild psychological guesses compared with which the proverbial anarchy of the jungle is well regulated.5 The level of anarchy is indeed hard to credit. There are people who believe that dissociative multiple personality is the protective response to child abuse. Others hold that child abuse causes anxiety in adult life. Others, again, believe that the profession of prostitution and alcoholism in later life is caused by childhood abuse; while others believe that anything is compatible with childhood sexual abuse. A recent biographer of Christina Rossetti asked to what extent her belief in ultimate celestial reward caused her earthly miseries and to what extent did it relieve them.6 In Ecclesiastes (1,18) we are told, "much wisdom, much sorrow," and it seems that Hildegard von Bingen did not hesitate to infer that melancholy is a God-sent punishment for our sins.7 At Al Azhar University, Grand Sheik Gad al-Haq Ali Gad al-Haq pronounced that lack of circumcision in young girls causes sharp temper in later life, and F Sulloway tells us that the firstborn are more confident and hence more conservative than their younger siblings, when we have been abundantly informed by other authorities that conservatism is a sign of lack of confidence.8 Vivien Eliot was given morphine-based depressants to control her moods and it was believed in the mid-1920s that she had inherited "moral insanity." In 1923, when Virginia Woolf

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described her as "very nervous, very spotty, much powdered," a Dr. Martens recommended she be subjected to a treatment which combined near starvation with the injection of animal glands.9 In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, most probably speaking from personal experience, wrote that "Sir William said he never spoke of 'madness'; he called it not having a sense of proportion."10 If one glances at these random examples, one can see how psychological reasoning is a free-for-all situation in which everything goes. And yet, given the obtrusiveness and virulence of somatic markers and the fact that they do not carry enough information to authorize an interpretation, as well as the lack of a system of rules which could have compensated for that absence of information, what could people do other than resort to do-it-yourself and avail themselves of the epistemological anarchy? THE USELESSNESS OF HERMENEUTICS There is not even any point in transforming the problem of which manufacture is true manufacture into a hermeneutic problem. One can do hermeneutics in relation to a text. One can use a number of techniques to find out why the text was written and what its author intended when he or she wrote it and whom the author was addressing and why. That way one can use a hermeneutic technique because one knows what one wants to find. If the author is still alive, he or she can accept the findings and give his or her consent. If the author is dead, one can still use hermeneutic procedures, even though the results cannot be verified by the author of the text. One can use hermeneutic procedures because one has a tangible and limited purpose in doing so and because one has the text in front of oneself. One is trying to ascertain the intentions that are contained in the text itself. If one's findings can be contradicted by the text itself, they are not truthful. Sticking to the text, one can even try to find out what the text means over and above and sometimes in defiance of what its author might have intended. In psychology, the case is very different and this kind of hermeneutics cannot yield much of a result. For in psychology there is no text to hand. The text (i.e., statements about the psyche) has to be manufactured, and it is precisely for that reason that we cannot strike rock bottom: The manufactured article's quality or truthfulness cannot be ascertained by a comparison of the article with the reality it purports to describe. That reality is nothing but neuronaly generated somatic markers, of which we are aware but only dimly, for they are opaque. We should also note that the pursuit of hermeneutics by itself can be very deleterious and inflict real damage because it helps to isolate the

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individual we treat hermeneutically from dialogue and from conversations which might help him or her to feel more secure in such identification of markers or moods which result from questioning them. After critical questioning, there is an exchange and a readjustment of what was initially a purely subjective identification. If the purpose of hermeneutics is to find out what somebody means in saying or doing this or that, hermeneutics is just an uncritical confirmation of that person's monologue. Hermeneutics seeks to find out what somebody defined as his or her moods and, in finding out, confirms such a definition but leaves that person high and dry with his or her findings. It does nothing toward creating confidence in those findings. There is a deceptive morality in such a purely hermeneutic procedure that has been exploited and paraded far and wide in our modern enlightened world. Such hermeneutics can claim to respect the other person so much that one accepts that the other person knows his or her mind well enough to let it be the final arbiter of what it means. In therapeutic practice this has led to "the enthronement of the patient," as if he or she were the last and the only authoritative arbiter.11 Such enthronement precludes any chance of an imposition of the therapist's or interlocutor's hunches or suspicion of what he or she thinks is going on. Insofar as hermeneutics involves genuine listening to what other people are saying, it is indeed on high moral ground. But this morality is, as I said, deceptive, for it does nothing for the other person's legitimate doubts about his or her self-identification. It does not remove hesitation and dispel the doubt and the uncertainty that must or ought to, in the nature of the case, surround it. Hermeneutics leaves the other person stranded and confirmed in what is in fact a false sense of security. At most, it does not help to dispel insecurity and doubt as to selfidentification because it does not ex officio draw the other person into a dialogue by suggesting any rules that should be followed in the identification of buzzing moods. It betrays a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the neurons and the moods they produce when it is claimed that it is possible for any one person to state how the moods can be identified and that he or she is the only and best judge of the correctness of such an identification. This misunderstanding of the fact that neurons are silent and produce at best opaque somatic markers has led many people nowadays to claim that when their self-identification is scrutinized or questioned they are being raped and terrorized. When the finding that not even the person whose state of mind is in question can know for certain what his or her state of mind is is rejected in favor of the view that the first person and only the first person knows for sure, any attempt to cast doubt on the first person's self-identification is seen as an attempt

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by people in power to oppress and exploit the weak and underprivileged, as Ronald Laing and Michel Foucault independently kept on insisting.12 Contrary to Laing and Foucault, it is of necessity inherent in the pursuit of psychology as such and is not something which people in power (Foucault) or authority (Laing) inflict on people in their care or in their power. Every person in his and her right mind must question and scrutinize all self-identifcation—their own as well as that of all other people. No self-identifaction can be allowed to stand and critical scrutiny is an eminently rational act, as far from rape and acts of terror as anything can be. The argument of Chapter 1 leads to the compelling conclusion that nobody is to be enthroned, neither the first person or patient nor a psychologist or any other observer. Above all, this argument recommends that psychologists, counsellors, and psychotherapists should be as dethroned as ordinary people and actual patients and ought never to appear in courts of law as "expert" witnesses. THE ROLE OF SUGGESTION Freud, of course, being in the grip of his scientistic misunderstanding, had his own answer to this situation. He postulated that there were unconscious motives for feelings and for behavior and that they could be found by free association and by watching dreams and interpreting them and that, moreover, whatever was in the unconscious had been put into it by early childhood repression of illicit, immoral, or asocial appetites. Though this Freudian postulation cannot be disproved, one must, as was shown in Chapter 3, have serious doubts about its admissibility Freud did not understand the quandary he had produced: In order to salvage psychology for science he had advanced a scientifically untenable postulate. Instead, he proceeded in a perfectly natural manner as if that quandary did not exist. Given this disregard of the quandary, it was perfectly reasonable for him, in the last analysis, to tell his patients what was really in their unconscious mind. As that mind was being controlled from the unconscious, there was no way in which the patient by himself or herself could have discovered what was in the unconscious. Freud had to tell the patient what he (Freud) thought was in it. The patient then gave his or her assent. Sometimes the patient had to be cajoled into giving assent, but eventually assent was not likely to be withheld because Freud was taken to be an authoritative figure, a scientist, and a trained medical man who surely would know how to discover what was hidden and that being told was neither rape nor an act of terror as both Laing and Foucault would have us believe.

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Critics of Freud have had a field day with the fact that Freud admitted openly that the patients could not know what was in their unconscious and that he had to tell them. "It is of course of great importance for the progress of the analysis that one should always turn out to be right vis-a-vis the patient, otherwise one would always be dependent on what he chose to tell one. It is therefore consoling to know that the pressure technique never fails. . . . The principal point is that I should guess the secret and tell it to the patient straight out; and he is then as a rule obliged to abandon his rejection of it."13 If the cause of the neurosis were like the cause of an abdominal pain, as Freud thought it was, this procedure and the attitude it was based on would be entirely sensible. In the case of the appendix there is a real pain caused by a real inflammation of an internal organ and only a trained doctor would know how it happened and why there was pain. Nobody in their right mind would expect the patient's musings on the subject to be taken seriously But states of mind, and not even repressed states of mind, are not like an appendix which can be sent to a laboratory. As I said, critics have made a real meal of these Freudian statements because they ignore Freud's own postulate which he had put into place in order to salvage psychology as a science and to make it look like ordinary medicine. Only if one is mindful of that postulate can one appreciate the significance of Freud's procedures. If one is not mindful, one can only conclude that Freud was an impostor who had no genuine or empirical knowledge of what was in the patients' minds but who professed without further ado that he simply knew what was in their minds because he had put it there. The real and only acceptable criticism to be made of Freud's procedure, as he described it in the quoted passage, is to question the postulation of the unconscious. If one does not question it, the chants intoned by the chorus of his detractors must sound silly. Freud was quite open about the procedure which amounts to suggestion, complete with the patient's final acceptance of the suggestion that has been made, but which, provided one accepts the postulation of the unconscious, does not at all look like a suggestion, but looks like an acceptance of a truth that has been discovered. The path that starts from the analyst's construction ought to end with the patient's recollection; but it does not always lead so far. Quite often we do not succeed in bringing the patient to recollect what has been repressed. Instead of that, if the analysis is carried out correctly, we produce in him an assured conviction of the truth of the construction which achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory. The problem of what the circumstances are

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in which this occurs and how it is possible that what appears to be a complete substitute should nevertheless produce a complete result—all this is a matter for later inquiry.14

By "later inquiry" Freud, of course, meant the demonstration that what looked like suggestion and an acceptance of a suggestion by the patient was not really a suggestion but a discovery of a truth, because, given the postulate of the unconscious, the patient was too resistant to the truth to accept its discovery by the psychologist, let alone to discover it by himself or herself. Hence the creation of the misleading impression that there was suggestion. In 1982, Donald Spence published his Narrative Truth and Historical Truth in order to demonstrate that Freud was right and that suggestion is not involved, at least not what we normally understand by the term.15 Spence proposed that we distinguish between historical truth, which consists of the discovery of what really happened in Ranke's sense, and narrative truth, which is a truth that differs from what actually happened but is nevertheless deserving of the designation "truth" because it is a "good story," in that "it carries conviction" as an explanation.16 In carrying conviction, it disposes of the suggestion that there is suggestion when such an explanation is being offered. Spence's distinction is not only specious, but wrong. Ranke's vision that one could tell a story about the past as it actually was was a pious but epistemologically untenable vision. Every story about the past is somebody's story and not a photographic record of what actually happened. The past by itself or in itself is real enough, but cannot be described. It is a flux of events which can be broken up in any way in which any observer chooses to break it up. It can be broken up into small events and into large events and they can all be assembled into stories in terms of intelligible, universal principles. But since these principles are not atemporally "universal" but differ from epoch to epoch and place to place because different people consider different principles to be "intelligible," the past can be represented in thousands of different fashions and every time one looks back at a story that has been or is being told the past appears in a different shape. The past in itself cannot be got at or laid hold of. The most one can do is to ascertain how the past was represented by somebody and then compare that representation of the past with the way it was represented by somebody else. One can find out what Thucydides said about the past and what Gibbon said about the past and how George Washington imagined the past. What is more, a historian can be demonstrably wrong in saying what George Washington said, but he cannot demonstrate that George

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Washington's story was demonstrably wrong. When there is talk of "truth" it means no more than that the historian has found out what Queen Victoria thought about the past.17 It must be recognized that the past as such is forever elusive. In other words, there is no "historical truth" as claimed by Spence. There is only what he calls "narrative truth." However, "narrative truth" is not to be measured or assessed by whether it is a good story, as Spence claims. It is to be assessed according to whether it tallies with other stories told by other people about the same epoch and the same place.18 In psychology, such tallying of stories is the only chance we have of gaining some confidence in autosuggestion and suggestion by others. Freud thought that such a limitation of the concept "truth" is not helpful enough. If the limitation is accepted, it would mean the psychologist can do no more than ascertain what his or her patient or interlocutor claims about himself or herself. Depth psychology was invented to entertain the possibility that the patient or interlocutor could be deluded in his or her own identification of his or her states of mind. Depth psychology is therefore supposed to replace the ordinary psychology in which the patient has the last word or in which the patient merely tries to tally his or her narrative with somebody else's. Jiirgen Habermas completely misunderstands the purpose and the very conception of depth psychology when he argues that the patient must have the last word and that a patient's rejection of what is being put to him or her as the real cause of a state of mind must be accepted as a falsification of the suggestion that it is the real cause.19 It is no secret that suggestion is at work in Freudian psychoanalysis. It was noticed by Fliess as early as 1901, and Freud himself was quite open about it.20 He stated that suggestion comes from transference. One transfers one's libido to the interlocutor and then accepts his or her suggestions for that reason. But, in the end, the transference must be cleared away so that what has been suggested will stand, so to speak, in its own right.21 This withdrawal of transference is easier said than done, and when transference is withdrawn we recognize often enough that what had been suggested does not remain behind and uncertainty returns. But there still remains the fact that if there is no suggestion and no suggestibility we would be, each of us, left with our own selfidentification and with the doubts which such purely subjective manufacture of eloquence must bring about. Griinbaum displays a complete lack of psychological finesse as well as ignorance of the silence of the neurons and the need for the manufacture of eloquence and of the uncertainty which lonely manufacture—allowed to stand on its own feet and respected as the last word—must result in, when he writes that Freud's patients were forced into "deferential submission" and chained

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to a Freudian vocabulary22 Griinbaum overlooks that in all attempts to fix states of mind and take away the vacillation that comes from subjective, lonely manufacture of eloquence, there has to be an induction into some kind of rule-governed game. Admittedly, it does not have to be a Freudian game. Indeed, in spite of what Freud claimed, there can be other such rule-governed systems. But Griinbaum is naive if he thinks that one can, psychologically, stand on one's own unsupported feet. Let me try to explain why and how the pure practice of this very impure psychological reasoning works in spite of the failure of Freud's attempts to make psychological reasoning look pure; and where the real contribution of Freud, as distinct from the contribution he alleged to have made, lies. Spence's spurious distinction between historical and narrative truth makes no difference to our problem. There is a story told by the psychologist, and there is a story told by the patient. If the patient accepts the psychologist's story, he or she is following a suggestion. According to Freud, suggestion only looks like suggestion. It is not really a suggestion because the psychologist, knowing as he or she does what is in the patient's unconscious mind, knows what the patient, often unbeknownst to him or her, is really feeling. The psychologist is therefore not imposing anything on the patient but is telling the patient the truth. Only if one does not share Freud's epistemological confidence is one left with the phenomenon of suggestion. The only consolation is that when it comes to our psyche, suggestion is not what people think it is. The term suggestion normally conjures up, at worst, brainwashing and, at best, cajoling and, possibly, parental or other authoritative guidance. This is so because we suppose that the brainwashed or guided person knows perfectly well what he or she is feeling and thinking, but cannot resist, for some reason or other, what is being put to him or her. In psychology the case is different. The person in question is open to suggestion because he or she has nothing much to go on. The neuronally induced buzzings he or she can listen to are telling nothing much. So, in the first instance, as has been explained, there has to be autosuggestion which leads to a hypothetical interpretation of what these buzzings are and mean. But since such autosuggestion has to be hypothetical—there is nothing to base a firmer proposition on—there remains doubt and uncertainty The person is thus not only open to suggestions from other people but also, since there cannot be a hard and fast standard by which to decide whether the autosuggested proposition is "better" than the proposition suggested by another person, to countersuggestions of his or her own. If one bears this situation in mind, the phenomenon of suggestion loses most of its prima facie connotation of manipulation, compulsion, en-

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slavement, oppression, or exploitation. Where the psyche is concerned, even a self-asserting interpretation of a neuronal buzzing is tentative and remains tentative because, since it does not correspond to (let alone portray) anything determinate, it cannot be confirmed. If it is set aside, for whatever reason, by the acceptance of another interpretation, we are not necessarily face to face with an act of submission or compulsion, but merely with an act of exploratory exchange. We live by suggestion all around. We stabilize our raw feelings by talking to others in a way in which they can understand us. We thus reidentify our intuited eloquence about our feels simply by conversation. When we write our identifications of our feels down, we formalize and stabilize them further, especially when we read what we have written, so much so that when we read what we have written we often get the impression that what we are reading sounds "strange," as if it had been written by somebody else. The final step toward stability comes when we read what somebody else has written, especially when we read poetry which is more eloquent than anything we might have spoken or written. Good poetry stabilizes the feels we have and identifies them and it most certainly does so by suggestion. Especially in reading poetry, we are enticed to subsume our own opaque feels, the meanings of which are dim, under the headings and words suggested to us by the poem. The poem raises our consciousness by giving us confidence that the poem's verbal identification of our own feel is correct. With that confidence there comes a retroactive effect in the original feel, because it now has been identified and, now that additional information has been imputed to it, it is felt with a higher intensity because it has become defined in so many words. A. E. Housman described such retroactivity when he said that the main effect of a good poem is that, if one happens to be shaving while the words come to mind, one will cut oneself.23 The verbal identification is, of course, not correct in the sense of corresponding to what the silent feel is, but correct in the sense that we yield assent to how the poet has put it. We willingly accept this suggestion because, left to ourselves, we are uneasy and uncertain about any eloquent label we ourselves have been able to come up with. Both Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot have described such stabilization in their own terminology. Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recollected in tranquillity What he ought to have said and, I am sure, what he meant to say, was that in writing poetry an uncertain mood which is inchoate but intense and vividly obtrusive is quietly transformed into an articulated state of mind. Thus it gains in clarity what it loses in opaque intensity. T. S. Eliot put it differently. He said that in writing poetry one is not expressing emotion, but escaping from it. He

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clearly meant that the intensity of inchoate mood cannot be expressed, because the poet himself or herself does not really know what it means or how it ought to be referred to. But the construction of words allows an escape from such inchoateness and such virulently confusing intensity into a verbal clarification.24 The elation we get when we at long last bring a silent buzz into clear focus by a worded label has given rise to the almost universal belief that words can have a magic power. To utter a certain word, it is widely experienced, can work miracles. And, in a sense, it can, except that the process is not at all magical, but the result of the fact that our initial awareness was opaque so that the appearance of articulated clarity does indeed seem a miracle. It is most certainly a transformation of neuronally generated somatic markers with only the meagrest of information into states of mind which contain a lot more information. The magic appearance of this transformation derives from the fact that the worded label is not caused by the neuronal event but is freely imposed on it, thus changing it into something it was not. THE CONTROL OF SUGGESTION Suggestion, autosuggestion, and suggestibility are basic facts of our mental life, and not confined to Freudian psychoanalysis or any other form of psychology. The buzzing generated by the neurons is silent and unidentifiable. Nevertheless, we have to identify it by the manufacture of eloquence about it. How can this be done, what guidelines are there for the manufacture, and how are we to distinguish between competing guidelines? The eloquence is not only manufactured, but also not manufactured with a view to any ready-made emotions and states of mind it purports to describe. The emotions and the states of mind, defined eloquently, do not, on the contrary, represent the neuronally generated moods and are not determined by them in any meaningful sense of the term "determined." There is nothing in the somatic markers themselves which could dictate what eloquence ought to be employed. Nevertheless, we relentlessly pursue the practice of such impure psychological reasoning as is contained in autosuggestion, suggestion, or any other kind of suggestibility. The point is that we have no choice, and the pursuit of such impure practices is not only socially necessary, but biologically intelligible and explicable. Man is a social animal. This has been known ever since man was identified by Aristotle as a nonfeathered biped. Ever since this identification, the word "social" has been taken to refer to cooperation and communion in peace and in war and in economics. But before any of these needs, there comes the need to achieve some clarity as to what

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one is thinking, feeling, and about to do. That need can only be fulfilled if we achieve clarity about our own neuronal buzzes and moods. They have to be identified. Identification, if it is to receive any degree of certainty and inspire confidence, requires the presence of more than one person; it requires a social setting. This roundabout way of creating confidence in any one identification is necessitated by the fact that one cannot gain confidence by looking at the neuronal events to see whether one's identification is correct or not. One can look at them, but all one will find is what neuroscientists have so far been able to discover: the firing of neurons, the electrical charges, the chemical reactions of the synapses, and the circuits which have been formed for these operations. None of these findings could add up to supporting any identification of them as this or that state of mind. And yet it is the state of mind—fear, anger, love, doubt—we are conscious of. One can easily jump to the conclusion that confidence is readily generated by introspection. If one wants to get clarity about one's own states of mind, one introspects; that is, one looks at them. The Oxford Companion to the Mind says laconically and categorically that such introspection "may seem to provide the most direct knowledge of ourselves that we have."25 This is easier said than demonstrated. Mountains of books have been written on the problem of introspection. On one side there are people who maintain that it is the only reliable road to gain knowledge about one's own states of mind, for how can other people, mere outside observers, possibly do more than guess or infer what they are. On the other side, there are people who argue against the reliability of introspection. Introspection, they maintain, is self-serving and likely to be mendacious and the last method to be trusted if one wants to know what one's states of mind really are. It is suspect. The Oxford Companion to the Mind continues by stating that "very little that goes on in the brain associated with mind is accessible to conscious introspection." Freud would heartily agree, because in his view introspection must of necessity be confined to conscious introspection and leave out the unconscious states of mind. In the present view, both sides are completely wrong or, better, beside the point. Introspection cannot serve its purpose because there is nothing there to be introspected. The neuronally induced buzzes can be felt in an inchoate and opaque way, perhaps as moods. But they cannot be pinpointed, not by the outside observer and not by the person who is having them. Outside observer and introspector are in the same boat. Both can manufacture hypothetical eloquence about them and any so manufactured eloquence remains tentative. That is all. The introspector, even more than an outside observer, is (or ought to be) aware of the tentativeness of the identification of his or her moods as this or that.

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Let us try to envisage how confidence in how we see our states of mind can be built up and how the tentativeness of manufactured eloquence can be attenuated. First, there is the single person. He or she has neuronal buzzes and is aware of ineffable moods. Then comes a hypothesis. This initial hypothesis can be put forward by the person who has the moods or by another person. The person who has the moods is not in a privileged position because he or she can do no more than what somebody else might do; that is, make a tentative hypothesis about the meaning of those moods. Thus, a mood is identified verbally and a label is produced. But as soon as this is done, there comes doubt. Is it the right label? Since there is no way of checking whether it is, the single person by himself or herself must remain in doubt and the uncertainty as to what the state of mind is will not go away, even though by now a verbal label has been produced and tried. As soon as a second person enters the field, a dialogue begins. Both persons now produce a hypothesis about the first person's mood. If both persons happen to produce the same hypothesis, some sense of certainty and assurance is created, not because there is evidence that it is the right hypothesis, but because a second person is present and concurs in the initial hypothesis. Such confidence may not amount to much more than afolie a deux. Suppose the two hypotheses do not coincide. What then? In that case we get an agonal situation, a confrontation. One person says "y" and the other person says "x." Since there is no possible empirical evidence from the neuronally induced mood as to which of these two hypotheses is the correct one, the confrontation must result in a battle of wills. Whoever is the stronger will eventually persuade the other that his or her hypothesis should stand. Since a recourse to evidence is not available, we get the situation described nearly two hundred years ago by Hegel: When two consciousnesses confront one another, one wants the death of the other.26 The conflict can only be resolved by a battle in which one is brushed aside. If one wants to gain more certainty about one's state of mind than is available from this kind of confrontation, a third person is needed. If the third person agrees with the person who is saying "x," then hypothesis x gains in certainty and breeds confidence. If the third person says hypothesis y is good, than hypothesis y, now having the support of two against one, gains in certainty and inspires more confidence than the hypothesis held only by one. In short, the battle of wills can now be resolved because with the possibility of majority rule the battle of wills can be transformed into an agreement to follow rules. The simplest way to establish a rule is to agree that the majority should prevail. Clearly, such a rule cannot be established when there are only two

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people present. Rule following is a more confidence-inspiring way of settling what the content of the first person's state of mind really is than either of the two preceding methods. In order to acquire a sense of certainty and some confidence in how we identify our moods, we need a "society" of at least three people. This may seem an odd way of identifying our neuronally generated buzzes, but in the face of the fact that those buzzes do not carry labels we can look at so that we might check whether any one identification is better than another or more in keeping with reality, it is the best we can do. This conclusion cannot come as a great surprise in our postWittgenstein era. Wittgenstein has demonstrated very convincingly that we acquire the meanings of what we are saying and thinking and intending not by looking at our "minds" (i.e., at our intentions), but by following rules of speech (i.e., by using words the way they can be understood by the people who share our form of life and who are committed to the same language game). The intentionality of the language we use is explained not by word-world connections or, in our case here, by word-marker connections, but in terms of intragrammatical connections between the sentences. I would also observe that it makes one wonder about the later Wittgenstein. If his explanation of how words get meanings and are understood can fall back upon psychology as the only instance which proves him to have been right, what does this say about the later Wittgenstein? It is indeed extremely doubtful whether Wittgenstein's account of how words acquire meaning makes sense when we are dealing with words which are supposed to or purport to have a reference. But is does make good sense when we are dealing with words which purport to describe our somatic markers which are inchoate; that is, with words which have no detectable reference. In such cases we are really constructing the somatic marker into a state of mind because it is now being referred to by certain words. We are certainly not describing any preexisting markers or states of mind. Such constructions have to be hesitant and unsettling when we are doing them in solitude, but become less so when we are in a community from which we learn certain rules that govern the use of those words. However this may be, if we now extend this argument a little further we will see that it explains beautifully how we arrive at acceptable and confidence-inspiring identifications of our silent moods: We do not look at our moods and confidently say to ourselves that one hypothesis is right and another wrong because, being a self-identification, there cannot be a better judge than the person himself or herself. On the contrary, such self-identification is or ought to be suspect, not least to the person who is making it. So we look at other people. We compare our hypothetical identifications with their hypothetical identification of our

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feel but realize that it is no more confidence inspiring than our own. Only if we get some kind of consensus do we become confident that the identification is "correct," even though we cannot say that it actually corresponds to what it purports to identify because there is indeed no second script. The practice and exercise of psychology, to make a long story short, depends on the community we are living in, not on our ability to look at something that cannot be seen (i.e., at the buzzes and moods created by neurons). Freud's real merit, as opposed to what he thought was his merit, consists of the creation of a smallish community of people who interact. He himself regarded the setting up of such interaction as an incidental means to the end of discovering what our unconscious dictates. Incidental or not, he took great, almost obsessive, care in the organization of the psychoanalytical community. It was as if he subconsciously knew that behind all his findings there stood the need for a community. If one discounts the untenable postulate of the unconscious, there still remains the great value of the formal interaction between people which helps to stabilize hypotheses about somatic markers. He was dedicated to the idea that we have to postulate the operation of repressed wishes in order to be sure that we can ascribe the right cause to whatever our states of mind are and, in identifying the right cause, ascertain what they really mean. But with this procedure, even though it is based on a correct understanding of the volatility of our conscious states of mind and on an appreciation of the fact that any attribution of content is tentative and, therefore, revisable, he took an unacceptable risk because he failed to satisfy the twentieth century, post-positivist criterion of science. With that procedure of identifying what the true content of our states of mind is, he inaugurated an era of psychology which was, if anything, even more uncertain and less confidence inspiring than ordinary folk psychology. His real achievement, however, was to have created a small community of patient and therapist which would lead to some confidence in the eloquence that was being manufactured. Looked at from the vantage point of the later Wittgenstein, we would say that he set up a language game which prescribed rules according to which we can make statements about states of mind which are more than uncertain and doubtful hypotheses. Ernest Gellner describes that language game correctly: "The technique was declared to be in the keeping of a severely demarcated guild/sect. . . . Its deployment was governed by rules so well defined as to make its effectiveness self-confirming."27 "Introspected material," Gellner writes in another place, "is terribly inchoate and labile, and we have no good natural language for it; Freudian and similar theory doesn't so much as transform it—rather it is a net which

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enables us to seize it all, to give it a local habitation and a name."28 Though Gellner diagnoses correctly that psychoanalysis relies on the creation of a Wittgensteinian language game, he remains vituperative because he seems to think that ordinary psychology can do without a language game (i.e., stand on its own feet). It cannot. The creation of the speech community is Freud's real contribution to the pursuit of psychology. "In Freudian theory, interpreting an event equals assigning a meaning to it in accordance with the rules of psychoanalysis."29 This much is true of all psychological reasoning. The only thing that is special for Freudian theory is that the rules include permission to have recourse to the unconscious. With or without that special permission, never before had anybody proposed that psychological reasoning depends on a speech community and its language game. Freud himself wrote before Wittgenstein had formulated his theory of language games and Freud, therefore, put it in terms of his old neurological Project. In order to explain why the language community established between patient and a therapist produces meaningful results, he said, "All the libido as well as everything opposing it, is made to converge solely on the relation with the doctor. In this process the symptoms are inevitably divested of libido. In the place of the patient's true illness there appears the artificially constructed transference illness."30 Wittgenstein would never have put it in this way. But to Freud, there was a given quantity of libido and that quantity, like a volume of water, could be directed this way or that way. Directed toward the therapist, it created a bond. Redirected to the patient, it could now be freely used by the patient for his own purposes. Wittgenstein was less analytical and thought that these language games take place in a Lebensform (form of life), which, he thought, was a spontaneous emergence.31 By contrast, there was nothing spontaneous in Freud's construction of such a Lebensform and its language game. With heroically dogged determination he carried out a self-analysis and so laid the foundation for the construction of the rules of a specific psychological discourse. Not surprisingly, he discovered in his own unconscious what he had set out to find there. When the construction of the rules was complete, the rules could be communicated to others and a community formed. The initial self-immolation was necessary because it provided the foundation stone. Once ready, others could be initiated into the set of rules. This way the original encounter between patient and therapist—an encounter which was nothing more than the confrontation of two minds which, according to Hegel, would seek the death of each other—could be enlarged to become an encounter between patient and therapist according to rules. True, there were two persons, but they would not seek the death of each other's consciousness, as Hegel had surmised, because

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they were restrained by a set of rules. It is interesting to note that Freud was more realistic, though less logical, than Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein's view, one person alone could not be the originator of a language. A private language, he said, is a contradiction in terms, for meanings are established by use and use is rule governed. A single person cannot or need not follow "rules" and for this very reason his private usages had no meanings and his private language would just be babble. Psychologically, we might add, it would do nothing toward stabilizing the meanings of somatic markers. But Wittgenstein did not pursue the logic of this analysis, which ought to have made him wonder where, in the initial absence of other people, the rules might come from. According to him, as long as there was more than one person a language game could be played. Freud, by contrast, became very aware of the fact that two persons locked in a combat or confrontation were as insufficient as one person. There had to be at least three and preferably more because two persons by themselves cannot establish rules. They can only argue and attempt to down one another. As Hegel had so well observed, when there are only two persons it is merely a matter of who has the strongest will. Freud realized that he would have to supply the rules by framing them so that both patient and analyst could follow them. Freud, psychologically more subtle than Wittgenstein, realized that such a commitment to a language game would involve "transference"—that is, a libidinal relation to the other person, in this case, to the therapist—and eventually to the community which practiced such a game and observed its rules. Wittgenstein contented himself by stating that language games arise spontaneously 32 The reason why I argue that we should understand Freud to have created such a language game is very simple. Wittgenstein demonstrated that when there cannot be ostensive definitions, as in the case of somatic markers, we must take it that words get their meanings from the rules of a game. As far as Freud is concerned, the argument of this book has established that states of mind cannot be established ostensively—either because the moods they interpret are not discrete objects we can point to or because the claim that they are disguises of unconscious moods is inadmissible. Hence, the present argument continues by taking Freud to have achieved something he had not intended. He created a speech community and a language game. Wittgenstein called such a community a form of life. Witty commentators on Freud have remarked that psychoanalytical practice is not so much a therapy as a way of life, which is to say that it is as close to Wittgenstein's Lebensform as can be. The exact nature of this similarity is worth exploring, because at first sight it must seem strange that there should be such a similarity. Wittgenstein's recourse to language games as the

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source of meanings depended on his logic. If one wants to define "table" by pointing at a table, one has to have already a word "table" in mind so that one knows what to point to. Hence, ostensive definitions involve an infinite regress. With Freud the situation is different. If the argument of Chapter 1 is correct, it is impossible to link the meaning of a verbally defined state of mind in a one-to-one correspondence to neuronal events and their somatic markers. Verbally defined states of mind do not describe neuronally produced markers but merely interpret them. Therefore, if one wants to acquire confidence in any one such interpretation so that one can suppose it to be more than a tentative hypothesis, one has to turn not to the markers and the neurons, but to other people who will concur in the ascription. Hence comes the recourse to a necessary language game which can define meanings without recourse or reference to somatic markers. This recourse and this necessity were not part of Freud's intention, because he believed that the meaning of a state of mind could be detected by gaining access to the unconscious of its owner and that such access would serve as an ostensive definition. Since this belief is both unscientific and, probably, erroneous, Freud can be thought to have taken the road to a language game. Hence the similarity to Wittgenstein. Let us therefore look briefly at the way such games are set up. Freud's description is sketchy because he did not really think he was setting up rules for a game. All he explicitly stated was that there was a need for another person, to wit, the analyst, and that the analyst would be trained to know how to dig below the surface and that during such digging the patient would develop a dependence on the analyst and so forth. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was very precisely explicit. His neatest instructions are contained in his On Certainty. "My 'mental state'... gives me no guarantee But it consists in this, that I should not understand where a doubt could get a foothold nor where further test is possible. . . . Now I would like to regard this certainty, not as something akin to hastiness or superficiality, but as a form of life. . . . Mistake becomes something forbidden. . . . Absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language game Every language game is based on words "and objects" being recognized again, we learn with the same inexorability that this is a chair as that 2 x 2 = 4 The language game . . . is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable)."33 Now apply these observations to Freud. We have seen that there cannot be empirical evidence (i.e., a "ground") for believing that there is repression into the unconscious and that repressed content acts at a distance to determine subsequent behavior. What is more, we have seen that there cannot be empirical proof that most of such content consists of incestuous wishes. Freud was wrong in claiming that there was.

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However, he provided rules for talking about the inchoate awareness, the somatic markers, the buzzes inside our bodies. He laid down how the words "conscious" and "unconscious" are to be used, determined which of our wishes are to be said to have been repressed, and so forth. The certainty of such knowledge did not derive, pace his own arguments, from empirical observation but, as Wittgenstein observed, from the fact that these usages were prescribed by a given language game. One may have strong doubts whether Wittgenstein was correct in thinking that we learn the use of the word "table" the way we learn that 2 x 2 = 4. But in Freud's case there can be no doubt. For unlike in the case of the table, there is no way in which the inchoate stirrings of somatic markers can be experienced as discrete and definable objects. There was no choice. All Freud could do was to formulate rules as to how words that are supposed to refer to these unreferable events are to be used. The difference between Wittgenstein and Freud is striking. Wittgenstein was reckless enough to claim that we learn to use words the way we learn that 2 x 2 = 4, when there are strong grounds for supposing that since the table is a discrete object we learn the word for it from experience. True, that experience may not be experience of tables, but it is very likely to be experience of when other people say "table." Thus, the table does play a role, even though that role may be indirect, via other people. Freud, on the other hand, went about it the other way. He had no ground for supposing that we can learn about repression and its effects from experience. But in laying down the rule as to how the word is to be used, he claimed, in order to avoid the appearance of Wittgensteinian recklessness, that he had derived his knowledge of repression from experience. Wittgenstein in fact remarked once that a Freudian behaved as if he had learned the expression "castrationsymbol" ostensively, when in reality, in saying that van Gogh's selfmutilation was a castration substitute (even though van Gogh himself did not know it), he had simply been following the rule of his language game—a rule which said that such self-mutilation is to be understood as a castration symbol.34 "I really want to say," Wittgenstein wrote in On Certainty, "that a language game is only possible if one trusts something (I did not say 'one can trust something')."35 Wittgenstein hit the nail on the head. The setting up of the rule how "self-mutilation" is to be used does not depend on our ability that we can trust our knowledge about self-mutilation, but, on the contrary, on our decision to trust. Or take another example. Wittgenstein remarked that the expression "unconscious thought" is not a contradiction in terms because words have the meaning we give them.36 If there is a language game in which this expression is not a contradiction in terms, the expression must be allowed to stand. Or take Wittgenstein's re-

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mark of 1947 on religion: "A religious belief can be only something like a . . . decision in favor of a system of reference," that is, a decision to use one and only one particular language game.37 The practice, if not the theory of a Wittgensteinian language game and its efficiency and efficacy was first discovered, long before Wittgenstein, by Breuer when he treated Anna O. and found that when he drew her into a conversation, with firm outlines and rules as to what was to be said, she experienced great relief of her symptoms. Anna O., or Miss Pappenheim as she might have been, herself christened this the "talking cure" and realized that it was possible for symptoms to be "talked away" (wegerzdhlt). The discovery became paradigmatic for Freud: "The state of things which [Breuer] had discovered seemed to me fundamental," Freud wrote in 1925.38 While we ought to give credit where credit is due, we also ought to bear in mind that Freud ascribed the efficiency of the talking cure to the fact that it had led to the discovery of the unconscious material which had caused the symptoms. He was not aware at this stage, nor probably ever to become aware, that he was here anticipating Wittgenstein and practicing what the later Wittgenstein was about to preach. Ellenberger notices—and this is of interest not only to Freudians but also to Wittgensteinians—that there was, at that time, a veritable climate of fashion in Vienna for "catharsis," though, and Ellenberger did not note this, one had to wait for the later Wittgenstein to understand why catharsis was so efficacious.39 Breuer was pragmatic. He saw that talking cures helped and left it at that. But Freud, dedicated to find truth, interpreted the success of the talking cure in terms of the postulate of the unconscious. He maintained that the reason why it worked was that it made the unconscious conscious. Once people were conscious of their troubles, of their suppressed memories and their repressed wishes, these memories and wishes would not necessarily go away, but would cease to be troublesome. The efficacy of talking cures is well attested and supported by vast anecdotal evidence. But Freud's interpretation of that efficacy is highly speculative and incapable of being tested and certainly falls foul of contemporary standards of science. Wittgenstein believed that Freud's explanations were adopted because they had a peculiar "charm."40 To start with, Wittgenstein probably meant bezaubernd, which is more accurately, though not necessarily, translated as "bewitched." The English "charming" is less ambiguous because it suggests "attractive" and could not really mean "bewitching" even though it does contain the notion of bewitchment. Next, Wittgenstein did not fully realize that an induction into what he called a language game was indeed a form of bewitchment: One learned the rules and, when one had learned them, one followed them and pro-

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duced discourse in following them as if one had been bewitched. An interjection that an ostensive definition would refute what one had been saying would be ruled out of order. The rules of the game cast a spell and one could truly say that one had been bewitched. The difference between an induction into a Freudian game and an induction into a Wittgensteinian game was minute. It only is made to look great if one translates what Wittgenstein was saying as "charm" rather than as "bewitching," because then an induction into a Freudian game was made to look as if it appealed by its mere attractiveness when, in reality, one became spellbound by its striking usefulness for enabling one to talk about somatic markers according to given rules when one could not talk about them directly or, if one did talk, be left with the uncertainty of one's own or other people's guessed interpretations. Freud achieved less than he had hoped, but more than Wittgenstein allowed. Freud did not just spellbind people by talking about uncanny events, as Wittgenstein seems to have implied when he used the term bezaubernd. He constructed very precise rules as to how one might or ought to talk about uncanny events. Freud's language game was nothing if not comprehensive. It not only provided vocabulary and rules for the formation of sentences about our states of mind, but also included rules for the transformation of religious and political beliefs into statements about repressed or sublimated states of mind as well as rules for the transformation of deeply held moral convictions into sentences about superego and its emergence from a resolved Oedipus complex. Last but not least, it contained instructions as to how to translate alleged respect for God or other authority into sentences about father figures. Wittgenstein put the induction into a Freudian language game very bluntly: "If you are led by psychoanalysis to say that really you thought so and so, or that really your motive was so and so, this is not a matter of discovery, but a persuasion."41 FREUD'S LANGUAGE GAME Freud's lonely pursuit of his own psychoanalysis is famous, but the enormity of the enterprise is rarely commented on. Everybody has stabs at what we think is going on in our minds, at what we may have forgotten, misconstrued, misremembered, and, perhaps, purposefully repressed. But the findings do not inspire confidence. That is why we need companions and friends and, in extreme situations, therapists to form a speech community in which we can play a language game according to set rules. That way the findings get modified and in modified form they inspire more confidence. Freud set out to construct the rules of his language game without such confidence-building support.

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All he had was the rules governing the use of his mother tongue, but within those rules he could have come up with absolutely anything. The fact that he had such firm confidence in what he came up with and in the rules which would lead others to make similarly confidenceinspiring findings shows that he was a person of unusually firm selfassurance. Galileo had confirmable grounds for shouting eppur si muovel and so did Einstein when he sent his totally revolutionary paper on special relativity to the editors of the Annalen der Physik. But Freud was more like Luther, who said, "Here I stand, I cannot do other," when he had convinced himself that his neurons and their somatic markers were telling him that no amount of human effort can produce a neuronal state which one might label "peace." Like Luther, Freud had nothing to fall back upon. The neurons that were the causes of his somatic markers could not speak to him and yield any specific information. He had to construct his own labels. People other than Luther and Freud would have felt uneasy, would have considered their findings to be tentative, and would have wondered whether they might be mistaken. In any case, Freud was conscious of his courage, for he did what he said nobody ever must do: carry out an exploration of his own unconscious without another person who knew the rules and applied the techniques that will yield "trustworthy" results. Wittgenstein never tried to formulate rules for a language game all his own. He contented himself with the finding that there were lots and lots of different language games around and always had been. The comparison with Luther is doubly poignant. First, it bears out that self-assurance of a conviction does not come from clinical observations. There are any number of clinical observations to the effect that the iustitia Luther was thinking about did not come solely through faith, but through work and human effort, even though not entirely so. Luther, in other words, could not claim to have arrived at his conclusion on the basis of collected observations. Second, Luther's conviction came to him, with well-documented ecstatic fervor, while he was emptying his bowels in his monastery's "cloaca."42 Hartmann Grisar, a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit, took this as an indication that Luther's enlightenment was lavatorial and ought to be treated as such and not ascribed, as Luther did, to an inspiration by the Holy Ghost. If, on the other hand, we look at Luther's experience of his enlightenment with Freudian eyes, we get a very different impression. Luther obviously was enjoying his anality and experienced excretory pleasure, and that enjoyment was the cause of his breakthrough release from the conventional wisdom he had been indoctrinated with and which he had learned, parrot fashion, in the schools. The bowel movement and the neuronal events that go with it are not in question, but it is clear that

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the corresponding emotions can be constructed in several, diametrically opposite ways. The physiology of the bowel movement and the chemicoelectrical neuronal events which control it, though undoubtedly the causes of the awareness or of the somatic marker in question, could be described in great detail and with precision, but no such description contains sufficient, let alone necessary, information to allow us to decide which of the verbal constructions of the accompanying states of mind—Luther's, Grisar's, or Freud's—are "correct." The pursuit of psychology, Freudian or other, is dependent on unconfirmable hypotheses. If there is to be confidence and security in a world in which there are nothing but unconfirmable hypotheses, one has to have the concurrence of other people. And this is precisely what Freud, having himself constructed a language game without such concurrence, provided. If the patient accepts a suggestion made by the psychologist, he or she cannot, logically, be more certain that the nail has been hit on the head and found what his or her buzzes really mean, than when he or she had manufactured his or her own homemade hypothesis. But the patient is open to suggestion. If he or she accepts the psychologist's suggestion, he or she will feel better and less troubled by doubt. As Freud put it, "The business of the analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functioning of the ego, with that it has discharged its task."43 Analysis achieves this functioning of the ego, because it provides a confirmation of a hypothesis, the patient's own or the psychologist's, and that confirmation instils confidence that the patient knows who he or she is and what he or she is feeling. The pure pursuit of this kind of impure reasoning works. Freud described the need for the concurrence of other people, or for the concurrence of at least one other person plus a set of ready-made rules, in his own terms: "In a psycho-analysis the physician always gives his patient . . . the conscious anticipatory ideas by the help of which he is put in a position to recognize and to grasp the unconscious material. For there are some patients who need more of such assistance and some who need less; but there are none who get through without some of it. . . . Another person must be brought in, and in so far as that other person can be of assistance the neurosis will be curable."44 Translated into the terminology of the present argument, we would not say that the other person is "cured," but that his or her induction into the speech community stabilizes his or her moods and inspires some confidence that the identification of those moods agreed upon by all parties helps him or her to look at himself or herself with a degree of equanimity which was absent when there could have been nothing but doubt about all self-identifications.

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This brings us back to the oldest charge made against Freud, which has been briefly discussed—the charge that analysis acts by suggestion. Most people would conclude that, if this is so, Freudian psychology stands condemned. For it makes psychology look like a fraud. Suppose that Copernicus, instead of offering proofs for heliocentricity had merely tried to lure us into a speech community the rules of which would have "suggested" to us that the sun is standing in the middle! Griinbaum has made the most of the charge, and Stanley Fish has reformulated it wittily in his essay on the Wolf-Man: "The real seduction . . . is the seduction not of the patient by his sister, but of both the patient and the reader by Freud."45 However, though the Wittgensteinian interpretation of Freudian psychological practice shows that suggestion is indeed at work, it also shows that it is controlled by the rules of a carefully established language game. The charge that there is suggestion and nothing but suggestion is true, but looks a great deal more sinister than it really is. Keeping to the example of the Wolf-Man, the facts may be in question, for the Wolf-Man may or may not have been seduced by his sister. But the "fact" is irrelevant. What is in question and what is relevant is how he identified the feel of the experience. His identification, whether it was of a memory, of a distorted memory, of a real experience, of a wish, of a fantasy, of the feel as something threatening, as something sweet, or as something mysterious, being his and his alone, must be tentative. Hence his unease and self-doubt. But the concurrence of another person stabilizes the doubt. And if there is, through that concurrence, a shift of the initial self-identification to a different but agreed common identification which the other person has suggested, the initial doubt is doubly dispelled in the new identification which has taken the place of the old identification. The charge of suggestion would only be damaging if there were a known way of stabilizing identifications of states of mind without suggestion (e.g., by reference to the certainty of an experience or by the detection of an unequivocally and explicitly certain neuronal circuit). Since no such strategies are available, reception into a speech community is necessary and inevitable, and insofar as such reception amounts to suggestion, suggestion must be ubiquitous. In the absence of an alternative, it cannot be considered sinister. Jerome Bruner writes, "When we enter human life, it is as if we walk on stage into a play whose enactment is already in progress—a play whose somewhat open plot determines what parts we may play and toward what denouements we may be heading. Others on stage already have a sense of what the play is about, enough of a sense to make negotiation with the newcomer possible."46 This is like saying that there always is and has to be reception into a

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speech community. If people are not inducted we get a situation of complete psychological anarchy in which people not only have any state of mind they fancy, but—what is worse—they do not even know with any degree of certainty or conviction which state of mind they fancy and are forever bound to wonder whether perhaps they ought to be fancying another. Orthodox Freudian analysis has no monopoly on the creation of such speech communities, although first-generation Freudians dearly loved to think that it ought to have and that framers of alternative rules were heretics. As Judd Marmor once put it, "Depending upon the point of view of the analyst, the patients of each school seem to bring up precisely the kinds of phenomenological data which confirm the theories and interpretations of their analysts Freudians elicit materials about the Oedipus complex. . . . Jungians about archetypes, Rankians about separation anxiety, Adlerians about inferiority, Horneyites about idealised images, Sullivanians about disturbed .. . relationships."47 Communally manufactured and communally accepted manufacture of eloquence was not invented by Freud. The world has always been full of it. We can recall the ancient Greek language game in which the rules prescribed that any state of mind be brushed aside as irrelevant. Whatever was happening had been ordained by ananke and when Priam, in despair of victory, looked at Helen, who had been the cause of the impending fall of Troy, he said that he could not be cross with her because she was not responsible. The consequences of her actions had been ordained by destiny: "To me you are not the cause, only the gods can be causes." He could not bring himself to hate her. "No psychology since has ever gone beyond this; all we have done is to invent, for those powers that act upon us, longer, more numerous, more awkward names which are less effective, less closely aligned to the gain of our experience, whether that be pleasure or terror."48 Or consider how other Greeks viewed their emotions. When the chorus in Aeschylus's Agamemnon chants "my innards are prophetic, my heart wheeling in circles of meaning against my truthful diaphragm. . . . My heart would utter all this, outrunning tongue." Ruth Padel explains, "I suspect that all fifth century usages of these words have some somatic tinge . . . always available, in direct relationship (here the contrast with us is very strong) with what people believed was inside people."49 Although we too still speak of "hearts on fire," for us such expressions are pure metaphor; for the Greeks they were not metaphorical, but understood to be literal. These Greek language games are strikingly different from anything we have become accustomed to with the help of Freud. The PlatonicChristian language game of psychology was different again.50 It designated emotions as all those unruly appetites of the flesh that must be

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kept in check by reason—or, if one was a Christian, by the grace of God. And then there was the Rousseau-inspired romantic language game which provided the rules for the manufacture of states of mind. All those states of mind that were said to be heartfelt and uncontaminated by reason and civilized prudence were to be promoted and identified as desirable. This language game was really an inversion of the Platonic one and owed more to the Christian suggestion that childlike innocence and simplicity of mind are the greatest virtues than Rousseau would have cared to admit. However this may be and however many language games there are and have been, the Freudian and similar language games have provided rules and meanings for the identification of states of mind in a world which is strongly individualistic and in which one cannot rely on a publicly organized and established culture to provide such rules and meanings. We face politics, sex, conviviality, and art as if we were naked and vulnerable. As David Riesman said long ago, all we can go by is to watch our neighbors and be guided by them.51 What he did not add was that they too were watching their neighbors so that the attempt to get guidance boils down to an unending system of positive feedbacks of cluelessness. We all can calculate, given certain information, what is implied in that information. But none of us Western moderns individually has the resources to form judgments. Well before Riesman, Freud made a very similar observation in his Civilization and its Discontents: "In an individual neurosis we take as our starting point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be 'normal.' For a group all of whose members are affected by the one and the same disorder no such background could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere."52 If Freud has failed in his attempt to disclose what we are really conscious of (as he had to, given the peculiar uncertain relationship between our somatic markers and our verbal labels for them), he has supplied us with a viable vocabulary with the help of which we can manufacture a lot of eloquence about our silent neurons, even though we are all living in a society which Riesman described as a "lonely crowd" and which Freud thought consisted of people all affected by one and the same disorder. The Freudian vocabulary has become all-pervasive and, in Erich Heller's words, "comes close to being the systematic consciousness that a certain epoch has of the nature and character of its soul."53 More soberly, Thomas Nagel expresses the same thought when he speaks of the pervasive influence of Freudian ideas on modern consciousness.54 The absence of cultural constraints and guidelines for an interpretation of our somatic markers is a modern phenomenon of Westernized man. Trobriand Islanders or Australian Aborigines, before their societ-

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ies came under the eroding influence of Westernization, were not in need of artificially and intellectually constructed language games any more than our own Western ancestors were a few centuries ago. The present frenetic rush into all kinds of religious fundamentalisms, as well as the idolization of traditional, ethnic cultures, is a hurried and ill-considered alternative to more thoughtful language games. At any rate, language games of the Freudian kind are in demand not because of human nature, but because of the specially modern condition human nature has given rise to. Karl Kraus once remarked that psychoanalysis is the disease it is supposed to cure. What he ought to have said is that psychoanalysis is indeed a remedy for a disease which is by no means universal and that, at best, it could be seen to be a remedy for a very special modern, Western situation. Freud has provided an idiom which helps us to gain confidence in the identification of our states of mind, whatever they are, without abrogating our own individuality. The Freudian language game allows for individual discovery and at the same time provides confidence in the discovery. This speech community assuages our fears of all those other individuals we are thrown together with, even though we are not ritually bonded to them. There were special features of how people were inducted into a Freudian language game. To begin with, practitioners of psychoanalysis were trained in a fixed system of ideas. They were taught to do what Kuhn calls "normal science."55 This means that the paradigm is fixed and one simply learns to follow the rules under the stated paradigm. Above all, there were "rules" to be learned, and these rules had to be monitored by what Plato would have called guardians.56 Once inside the game, there was to be free association based on and performed on verbal labels. The meanings of verbal labels was taken for granted. The free association was association of labels and was taken not to be dragging in somatic markers. The presence of their established meanings made sure that there was no raw material, but a torrent of words that was ready made for being strapped together according to prevailing rules. As time went by, the patient's free flow of associations would decrease because there comes an apparent increasing impediment to free expression. This decrease in the patient's unrestrained participation is in reality a representation of the patient's growing conception of his inner world.57 In other words, the patient shows signs of having learned the rules of the game and is beginning to follow them. As Freud put it, "[She] had put the affect into words," and, further on, "[She was] allowing its strangulated affect to find a way out through speech."58 The patient, when inducted, becomes a collaborator. The rules are beginning to "grip his interest."59

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The power of the rules of the game also explain what is meant by Abreaktion, the reacting away of pent-up emotions. In reality this means that there are strongly felt moods. When they are assigned a name and elevated to the level of a genuine emotion, the pressure that had been experienced is abated. We now know what it is we are feeling. The mood has been identified as this or that emotion. This talking cure, the induction into a Wittgensteinian language game, is beneficial because it locks people into the rules of the game so that they can gain confidence in the labels and identification of their moods which are made in accordance with its rules. This means that by induction into such a game they are being shifted from their own purely subjective and idiosyncratic labels to those that are acceptable to other players. Admittedly, the relief thus gained is not gained for the reasons Freud alleged. Freud thought that relief comes from the fact that the content of the unconscious is revealed by free association and dream interpretation and that cure results when the true content of the unconscious is made conscious. What light does this conclusion throw on Griinbaum's tally argument? Griinbaum argues that Freud's therapeutic procedure was circular, because it identified cure with the discovery of the real cause of the disturbance and then, when cure resulted, claimed that whatever content of the unconscious had been reached must have been the cause of the disturbance. Griinbaum is right in insisting that such an argument is circular and cannot prove that the content of the unconscious was the cause of the disturbance, but his being right is irrelevant. For in spite of what Freud claimed, there is a perfectly good explanation of why the treatment brings relief. It does so because treatment amounts to an induction into a language game. We can now amend Freud's epigram, "Where id was, let ego be," to read, "Where there was anarchy of labelling, let there be rules for labelling." Let me briefly sketch how it works. Let us assume, for argument's sake, that we are using a Freudian language game. There is a young woman who says she wishes to be an athlete. But instead of training and keeping herself healthy, she spends her time and all her energy in acquiring the most sophisticated and expensive sports gear. After a while, she realizes that the possession of that gear does not make her an athlete, but instead of mending her ways, she claims that she does not want to be an athlete but a tennis player. So she gets rid of the athletic gear and acquires in the same avid manner a tennis racket, tennis shoes, and the most expensive balls available. And then she realizes that the possession of the things does not make her a tennis player. After four or five such attempts, she gets very discouraged.

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Her depression, as far as she can tell herself, is partly due to the fact that she has become uncertain about her wishes to be an athlete, a tennis player, or a rock climber. But uncertainty is not denial. She is still toying with the wish to become a sportswoman of some kind. She is toying with and is torn between conflicting identifications of her moods, and well she might be, because all she can fall back upon are her moods. But these moods are inchoate and the neurons which are causing them are silent and, for that reason, there is nothing much to go by. It is up to her, but, being alone, she is and ought to be lacking in confidence as to what identification is "correct." When she enters a language game and exchanges views with another player, she feels some relief. It is then put to her that she does not really wish to be a sportswoman, but that her manifest wish is a symbol of a repressed wish, so repressed that she is unconscious of it. The repressed wish is connected with anal pleasure, for the obsessive and compulsive retentiveness of sports gear is a symbol of anal retentiveness and anal excitation. At first she resists the suggestion, then she starts wondering, and when it is put to her that when she was an infant she had had her anus tickled by a friend of her father, she becomes more interested. At first she claims that the suggestion might be true though she cannot recall the incidents. And after a little while she starts wondering whether the incidents did actually happen even though she cannot now recall them. In the end, pressured by the plausibility of the suggestion and firmly located inside this particular language game, she consents and claims to be able to recall those incidents. By this time, her ability to distinguish whether she really was or was not tickled has diminished, because she is now interested in the connection between her unconscious, latent anal fixation and its manifest symbolic expression as the desire to acquire equipment. The whole thing becomes doubly intelligible to her when she realizes that, according to the present language game, she went through an anal pleasure phase as an infant and that the reason why her development had become retarded and arrested on this phase was because she had actually wished to be tickled more and more. Since this wish, her infantile contribution, was unacceptable both to her and her parents and siblings, it had been repressed, only to surface much later in a symbolic form as the obsessive desire to acquire sporting equipment. When her conversations with the other participants in the language game have reached this point, she feels liberated because she can now stop buying equipment and cease to justify the purchases by expressing a wish to be a sportswoman. The particular language game she has joined in prescribes that her present wishes have causes and, since she herself is uncertain as to those causes, the rules state that the causes are unconscious (i.e., un-

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known to her). For this reason, she is open to the hypothesis that her anal fixation had resulted from her wish to be tickled, rather than from the fact that she had been anally tickled by a friend of her father. And since she now thinks that the fixation was due to her own wish for it to be continued rather than to something she had actually experienced, she realizes that the distinction between fantasy and reality does not matter because the wish was as causally efficacious as any real experience might have been. Wittgenstein would have concurred.60 This kind of depth psychology game is no worse and no better than any ordinary psychological discourse. Both ordinary psychological discourse and the depth-psychology discourse provide a structure for neuronal buzzings, neuronally induced moods, and the consequent uncertainties of self-identification of those moods. Many years ago, Thomas Szasz drew attention to the fact that hysterical behavior is a form of language, not an identifiable illness, and that to look for its etiology, as Freud was wont to do, is "about as sensible as is looking for the 'etiology' of mathematics."61 He argued instead that we should consider the entire therapeutic situation as a language game. The patient is saying, "Do something for me!" Whether he or she is giving this message in so many words or as a hysterical pain or paralysis does not matter. The therapist ought to understand that there is no point in searching for what really happened to produce the hysterical behavior. The therapist can help by translating the body language or the explicit verbal cry into a protolanguage. In the protolanguage the meaning is clear. It is, "I am disabled, I am suffering, I need help." "All one needs to do," Szasz writes, "is to conceptualize this in terms of translation, and the problem of conversion and psychogenesis assume novel, more manageable proportions."62 Szasz does not refer to either Hegel or Wittgenstein. As a practicing therapist, he was not so concerned with the philosophical standing of his insight, but his insight was pathbreaking. He diverted attention from the search for the real cause to a search for a cure or an alleviation by showing that we are here in the realm of language, bodily or verbal, as the case may be. In his argument, people behave hysterically, "either because another language has not been learned well enough or because this language happens to be especially useful."63 His conclusion was that psychopathological phenomena are more akin to language than to an illness and that we cannot approach them with a view to "treating" them.64 What one has to do is to assist the sufferer to learn a different language game or, better, to induct him or her into a different set of rules. Gellner writes, "One way of seeing the ideological achievement of Sigmund Freud is to understand that he has constructed a solid, nonconjectural, support-providing world, something that had disappeared

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from our life; that he invented a technique for supplying this commodity made-to-measure for individual consumers; and that he had erected it using exclusively modern intellectually acceptable bricks."65 The last part of this sentence, with Gellner's own emphasis, needs to be revised. The bricks Freud used—the postulate of the unconscious which is supposed to restore causal determinability to states of mind which do not refer determinably to the neuronal buzzings they purport to refer to—are modern, but not acceptable. Gellner is right in saying that Freud used "modern" bricks. This becomes clear when we compare Jung's conception of the unconscious to Freud's conception. For Jung, the unconscious was an active motivator of human feelings and behavior, but its contents were something quite nebulous—something like Plato's transcendental realm of Forms. His unconscious was collective (i.e., something shared by all human beings). How and why these genetically transmitted collective archetypes should be "unconscious" is and remains a Jungian mystery. Unlike Freud's sexual appetites, talk of which had to be as repressed as indulgence itself lest there was unsustainable population growth, there is nothing to be ashamed of in Jung's archetypes and, hence, no reason why they should ever have been repressed. For Freud, the unconscious contained wishes we are ashamed of and there is therefore good reason why they should have been repressed. Freud's unconscious contained precisely what the individual had repressed into it. There was nothing nebulous about it. It was like Locke's bucket mind: the sum total of what has been repressed. There is nothing in Freud's unconscious which had not been repressed into it. Unlike Jung's view of the unconscious, which harked back to Plato's invisible realm of Forms, Freud's view had a decidedly modern ring about it. It placed the burden of and the responsibility for it squarely on the individual and considered the process of repression to be a mechanical event. The bricks which Freud used were modern indeed and all of a piece with our modern individualism and the belief in mechanical causation. However, Gellner is wrong in saying that Freud's bricks are acceptable. A language game which includes the rules that some states of mind are unconscious offends against the very idea of a language game, for it includes the rule that one can always evade rules by claiming that there are motives or wishes which are unconscious. In such a language game the cards are stacked against the chances of reaching the kind of consensus which is required to allay uncertainty and doubt as to what anybody's real states of mind are and the ball is, therefore, permanently in the server's court. The analyst, able to have recourse to the suggestion that the patient's unconscious has not yet been accessed, must of necessity always have the last word. The patient, if he

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or she is to gain certainty and confidence, can only do so by succumbing. If the reply is made that the unconscious has been dug up, there is, in such a language game, the further rejoinder that it has not yet been dug up enough or (as Freud is known to have put it when somebody resisted or rejected his suggestion), "You have been insufficiently analyzed." If recourse to the unconscious is permitted, the system becomes anarchical or, at best, remains a battle of wills—precisely the sort of situation the game was designed to prevent. Even though the fact that there are stated rules and a whole community of rule followers, these rules state that there are never more than two players at any one time. They remain locked in a Hegelian battle of wills where victory goes to the one who is emotionally powerful and threatening enough to have the last word, which is always, "If you do not accept my construction of your neuronal buzzings, there must still be identifiable states of mind you are not conscious of." The purpose of the language game was, it must be recalled, to transcend that Hegelian situation in which one consciousness wants the death of another consciousness. Psychological reasoning is, first, a matter of autosuggestion, which must create doubt as to its correctness; second, it becomes a battle of Hegelian wills and this battle cannot be done away with when recourse to the unconscious is permitted. Or, better, it can only be done away with when the analyst downs the patient or, in a nonclinical situation, one partner is obviously more powerful than the other. The so called Wolf-Man reported many years later, when he was recollecting his emotions in tranquillity, that shortly after he met Freud for the first time, he thought to himself, "This man is a Jewish swindler, he wants to use me from behind and shit on my head."66 In the event, as is well known, it turned out that in this initial confrontation of two wills, Freud's will proved the stronger and the Wolf-Man succumbed. The inherent impurity of psychological reasoning remains. It was not improved but made more impure by Freud's rule that one may claim that some states of mind are unconscious. In Chapter 31 explained that Freud introduced that rule for the best of motives and intentions: He wanted to make psychological reasoning pure—more, not less, scientific. But as things turned out, he made it doubly impure. Since there are no ways of measuring degrees of impurity, we ought to be grateful to Freud for enlarging our field of vision and not mind that he did not succeed in making psychology pure. Since we cannot do without psychological reasoning, however impure, we must remain engaged in the pure pursuit of that impurity and conclude, with apologies to Umberto Eco, stat mens pristina nomine, et nomina nuda tenemus (Our pristine mind is but a word, and naked words are all we have).

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NOTES 1. Adolf Griinbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). 2. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 19551964), S.E., 23: 261 (hereafter cited as S.E.). 3. Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins, trans. L. M. Friedman (London: Fontana, 1960), 653. 4. Cf. E. R. Wallace IV, "Review of Griinbaum The Foundations of Psychoanalysis,'" The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 174 (1986): 383. 5. See R. Porter, 'The Complacency of Sir Aubrey/' Times Literary Supplement, 25 August 1996, pp. 12-13. 6. Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994). 7. R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Saturn und Melancholic (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 140. 8. F Sulloway, Bom to Rebel (New York: Pantheon, 1996). 9. Peter Ackroyd, T S. Eliot (London: Hamilton, 1984), 62,134. 10. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1964), 107. 11. Jiirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest, trans. J. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 261. 12. R. D. Laing, Self and Others (London: Tavistock Publications, 1961); M. Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. R. Howard (New York: Vintage, 1973). 13. S.E., 2: 281; cf. also 3: 204. 14. S.E., 23: 265-266. 15. Donald Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (New York: Norton, 1982). Spence is not an isolated case. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 140f, expressed the opinion that Freudian narrative "supersedes" the novel's narrative because it is more "complete." For similar views on the alleged truth-magic of case histories see, for example, D. E. Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); and B. A. Farrell, The Standing of Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 146. 16. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth., 31. 17. Cf. Peter Munz, "The Historical Narrative," in The Historiography Companion, ed. M. Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997). Also Peter Munz, The Shapes of Time: A New Look at the Philosophy of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1977). 18. See Munz, Shapes of Time, 281. 19. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 266. 20. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters ofSigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, trans, and ed. J. M. Masson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985), 447. 21. S.E., 16: 451; 20: 42. 22. Griinbaum, Foundations of Psychoanalysis, 144. 23. A. E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 47.

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24. For Wordsworth, see "Preface," Lyrical Ballads. For Eliot, see F. Kermode ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 43. On June 6, 1831, Goethe, referring to the end of Faust II, said to Eckermann, "When it comes to such supersensual matters, I would have lost myself in complete vagueness if I had n o t . . . given a beneficially limiting form and firmness to them by casting them into the sharply defined forms of Christian-ecclesiastical figures and representations." Goethes Gesprache mit J. P. Eckermann, ed. F. Deibel, Vol. 2 (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1908), 327, my translation. 25. R. Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 388-389. 26. G. W. Hegel, Jubilaumsausgabe, Vol. 10 (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1927-1930), 282-283. See also Phenomenology of the Spirit, sec. 187-189. 27. Ernest Gellner, Reason and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 89. For good or ill, we ought to notice that Gellner in a footnote refers here to his earlier book, The Psychoanalytic Movement: Or the Coming of Unreason (London: Paladin, 1985), as The Psychoanalytic Movement: Or the Cunning of Unreason. It is hard to know whether this is a Freudian slip into Hegel's philosophy of history or a genuine case of Hegelian Aufhebung. I understand from a verbal communication from Ian Jarvie, one of Gellner's personal friends, that the mistake occurred because Gellner's publisher, less familiar with Hegel than Gellner, misheard what Gellner had said to him on the telephone and took it that when Gellner said "cunning," he must have meant "coming." 28. Gellner, Psychoanalytic Movement, 56. 29. R. S. Steele and P. B. Jacobsen, "From Present to Past: The Development of Freudian Theory," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 5 (1977): 393. 30. S.E., 16: 454. 31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), II, xi, p. 224e. 32. Ibid. 33. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 356-358, 367, 370, 455, 559. 34. C. Barrett, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), 46. 35. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 509. 36. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 57-58. 37. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. and trans. G. H. V Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 64. 38. S.E., 20: 21. 39. H. F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (London: Fontana Press, 1970), 484. 40. C. Barrett, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 24-25. 41. Ibid., 27, italics added. 42. Hartmann Grisar, S. J., Luther (London: Kegan Paul, 1913), 396-397. 43. S.E., 23: 216-253. 44. S.E., 10:104. 45. Stanley Fish, "Withholding the Missing Portion: Power, Meaning and Persuasion in Freud's 'Wolf-Man,'" Times Literary Supplement, 29 August 1986, p. 936, col. 4.

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46. Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 34. See also R C. Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 255. 47. Judd Marmor, "Psychoanalytic Theory as an Educational Process," in Psychoanalytic Education, ed. J. Masserman (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1962), 289. 48. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. T. Parks (London: Vintage, 1994), 93-94, 97-98,191. 49. Ruth Padel, In and Out of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 36. 50. See T. Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors (London: Routledge, 1977), 47. 51. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). 52. S.E., 21: 144. 53. E. Heller, "Observations on Psychoanalysis and Modern Literature," in Psychiatry and the Humanities, Vol. 1, ed. J. H. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 35. Cf. what W. H. Auden said about Freud: "To us he is no more a person/Now but a whole climate of opinion/Under whom we conduct our differing lives," W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 217. 54. Thomas Nagel, "Freud's Permanent Revolution: An Exchange," New York Review of Books, 11 August 1994, p. 56, col. 3. See R. Tallis, Enemies of Hope (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 256. 55. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 23-34. 56. F. Sulloway, "Reassessing Freud's Case Histories," Isis 82 (1991): 269, 270, 274. 57. M. Edelson, Psychoanalysis: A Theory in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 18-19. 58. S.E., 2: 255, 282. 59. S.E., 2: 282. 60. Cf. J. Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud, trans. C. Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 53,125. See also Barrett, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 26-27. 61. Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (London: Paladin, 1972), 119. 62. Ibid., 118. 63. Ibid., 29. 64. Ibid., 28. 65. Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement: Or the Coming of Unreason (London: Paladin, 1985), 126. 66. Quoted in Stanley Fish, "Withholding the Missing Portion: Power, Meaning, and Persuasion in Freud's 'Wolf-Man,'" Times Literary Supplement, 29 August 1986, p. 935, col. 1.

6 A Concluding Postmodern Postscript

THE MASTER PSYCHOLOGIST Theory and therapy apart, Freud was one of the really great masters of psychological eloquence. Many of his famous obiter dicta indicate his sureness of intuitive touch and are treasures of insight. To start with, he brought sex out of the closet. Everybody had always been thinking about sex—not the least because, unlike hunger and the need for shelter, it was regulated by culturally imposed restrictions—but people were not in the habit of talking about it and whoever thought about it had the uneasy feeling that he or she must be "abnormal," which meant that everybody told themselves in secret that they were "abnormal." True, toward the end of last century there had been a lot of talk about sex, but such talk was not about its ubiquity and pervasive compulsiveness. It was talk about abnormal and perverse sex and talk about kinky eroticism. Since Freud, we have realized that everybody else also thinks about sex and that we are neither mad nor abnormal when we do. Freud also put his sure finger on the difference between archetypal and willful fantasy when he said, in reply to Jung who had asked him whether Dada was a form of insanity, "Nonsense, it is far too mad for a decent insanity!"1 And then there is a host of more specific wisdoms. Growing up, he remarked, is very difficult and it is a shame that we have to do it when we are so young. "A man with an erection is never wise," may sound like a banality, but it leads us right into the depths of asocial behavior, of sadomasochism, of tangled marriages, and the whole gamut of adolescent turbulence in spite of Margaret Mead's ef-

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forts to convince us that these turbulences are nothing more than the self-inflicted products of our own restrictive Bible-based culture.2 Not least, there is Freud's understanding of sexual repression. The notions that we abstain from sex because it is sinful, impure, polluting, evil, carnal, low, and at best permissible inside marriage are so much mumbo jumbo invented, dishonestly so, to rationalize the taboo. The real reason for the taboo is birth control. Each society can only tolerate a given number of children and a society with too many cannot survive. If anything, there was an obvious selective advantage for people who held the moral and psychological reasons which tabooed sexual activity. How right Freud was! The moment the pill appeared, the taboo weakened and then vanished. We must note, however, that Freud rarely linked sex to reproduction.3 He thought that sexual repression was required by the demands of civilization and for this reason he would not have endorsed the current vogue of liberalism, even if he had known of the pill. Limits on the gratification of instinctual drives, Freud reasoned in his famous Civilisation and its Discontents of 1929, makes for a better, united community 4 Equally trenchant are his remarks that it is very difficult to relate to anybody when there never has been any libido and that whenever a man and a woman are in bed together, there are always two other people present, her father and his mother.5 By these remarks he meant to indicate that in every adult there are patterns of feeling which stem from early sexual childhood experiences which cannot be eradicated. But he also indicated in other places that since all people are basically bisexual, hovering presences of other persons do not necessarily have to be presences of persons of the opposite sex.6 Or take his aside that only he who has been his mother's favorite darling is likely to achieve the full self-confidence which leads to success. This may not even be literally true, but Freud's perception of the possible relationship of being a favorite to being successful is seminal. Look at his observation that children are not innocent, especially not sexually so. Again, the reasons he gave may not be correct, but the observation is trenchant. Added to this was his insight that genitally oriented sexuality is only the end stage of a long development which begins with the polymorphous perversity of the infant's experience of pleasure when taking and excreting food. He also drew our attention to the fact that pleasure renunciation is at the center of human development. Before Freud, such renunciation had been considered a moral imperative and had been followed, more or less punctiliously, for religious reasons. Kant had improved on those reasons by pointing out that there is a purely rational ground for suspecting pleasure. But it was Freud who showed that there are biosocial reasons for such renunciation and that morals by

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themselves are neither here nor there. If people do not manage to renounce pleasure, they and their fellows will come to real harm. Moreover, he also explained how the whole history of the human species had involved from early on a renunciation of pleasure. Last but not least are his observations on toilet training and his understanding that it is continuous with sexual restraints. The depth of his observation in this sphere is hard to understand for an adult who has forgotten the ease experienced when one could empty one's bowels and bladder in the comfort of warm nappies or bedclothes. On a slightly more theoretical level, there stands his insight that not only hysterics, but everybody is "suffering" from memories because the past, pleasurable or painful, always transfers itself to the present. These often unconnected insights spurred his thoughtful forays into the history and meaning of human cultures in which renunciation of pleasure and gratification are at the center of both human development and of the child's identity. Note that I am thinking here of his substantive insights, rather than of his explanations of them and rather than of such metapsychological concepts which have become household words: repression, regression, transference, projection, and sublimation. Freud, even when he was wrong, was usually more right than other psychologists when they were right. PSYCHOLOGY BETWEEN TWO STOOLS In spite of this, we are now witnessing a barrage of vituperations and accusations against Freud almost without parallel in the history of thought. The barrage is so thick and fast that one gets the impression that its authors are cheerleaders, encouraging each other and forming something like a mutual support team in which one or the other member becomes a player, only to rejoin the team when he or she has finished in order to shout support for another member who has taken the field. Chronologically speaking, it started with Masson's allegation that Freud was consciously dishonest when he abandoned his seduction theory. But since then it has been alleged by Allen Esterson that there was nothing to be dishonest about and that the seduction stories had been gratuitously invented in the first place.7 As if this were not enough, we have been treated by John Kerr to a revision of the Sabina Spielrein affair to show that, initially, Freud was indebted to Jung and not the other way around. 8 We are now also told that Jung was blackmailing Freud because Freud was having a secret and illicit affair with his sisterin-law.9 The blackmail story does not really wash because if one reads between the lines of Jones's account of Freud's relations with his sisterin-law, one sees that Jones comes as close as one can to admitting that

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the affair was no secret, but known, so that blackmail was impossible.10 In any case, even though it says nothing much about psychology or psychoanalysis whether Freud did or did not sleep with his sister-inlaw, Frederick Crews reports gleefully "that the jury is still out on the Freud-Bernays question."11 There has also been a revision of Freud's story about his patient Dora. Freud, it is now documented, thought that there was something wrong with Dora because she had resented the kisses of her father's friend. A healthy young woman should enjoy being kissed! Her father, it has turned out, sent her to Freud because he would have liked her to become his friend's mistress so that he could have his undisturbed affair with his friend's wife. There was a barter and Freud allowed himself to be made the broker.12 In addition, it has now turned out that the WolfMan left his own description of his symptoms which differ profoundly from those reported by Freud.13 The Rat Man has also been subjected to minute investigation,14 and so has the Schreber case.15 In all these cases it has been shown that Freud's case histories are not reliable reports and cannot be used as empirical evidence to support his theories. There is a summary survey by Frank Sulloway which dwells on the incompleteness of these reports and on their inconclusiveness and unreliability16 In addition to all these findings, there is the running battle fought by Frederick Crews against Freud, a battle that adds nothing new and consists of nothing more than wide publicity to all these doubts about Freud's personal integrity when he was presenting his empirical evidence. However, as argued in Chapter 3, the incompleteness of Freud's stories about clinical evidence is their least trouble. If the postulation that there are mental states which are unconscious is allowed, all empirical evidence, whether compiled with integrity or without integrity, becomes irrelevant. The postulate makes everything that is said immune against falsification and even if the case histories were all complete and honestly obtained, the misgivings due to the postulate would remain. Freud himself would have explained that barrage as a last-ditch attempt at resistance to the truth, even as he was wont to brush aside earlier criticisms. But since we are engaged in a critical evaluation of psychology rather than a defense of Freud, this move is not open to us. We must therefore look more closely at the philosophical reasons for this barrage, reasons which are in danger of being swamped by the campaign against Freud's personal integrity. Philosophically speaking, there is only one decisive case to be made against Freud. It is the case made by Popper. As explained in Chapter 3, it is this: If we are permitted to invoke unconscious states of mind as

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causes, psychological explanations cease to be scientific because they are necessarily unfalsifiable. This case seems unanswerable and impeccable. Griinbaum's case, by contrast, is wholly spurious because it is based on one false and one erroneous consideration. The false consideration is that there are some Freudian theories which are falsifiable, as if falsifiability were not precluded by the possibility of unconscious causation. The other consideration (i.e., the "tally" argument) ceases to be of importance once we understand that it applies to all psychological reasoning as such, not just to Freud's psychological reasoning. Since any confrontation of the crux of the matter—the scientific inadequacy of the concept of the unconscious—is studiously avoided, one must wonder what the driving force of this anti-Freud campaign might be. My suggestion is that it is driven by the uneasy realization that Freud has fallen between the two stools of modernism and postmodernism. Modernism comes in several varieties. In one of its forms it insists that true knowledge is knowledge which has been put together piecemeal from verifiable observations. Alternately, it can consist of the view that true knowledge is hypothetical knowledge which is in principle falsifiable, but has so far stood up to attempts to falsify it. Freudian psychology falls short by all these different standards. Postmodernism, on the other hand, insists that all knowledge is knowledge by a subject who is doing the knowing and is therefore irremediably subjective and exclusively relative to that subject. There are as many bodies of knowledge as there are subjects, and all knowledge tells us much more about the subject who is doing the knowing than about the object alleged to be known. In any case, by postmodern reasoning all signifieds fall under the signifiers which constitutes, determines, and defines them. There are, in other words, only signifiers. By these postmodern standards, Freudian psychology's claim to lead to an objective truth is fatally flawed because there cannot be anobjective truth. By postmodern standards, the very concept of an analysis which aims to find out what really happened as distinct from a person's self-avowal is an illicit attack on the ultimate sovereignty of the subject. One can readily see how Freudian psychology falls between these two stools. In one sense it is modernist, because Freud tried his hardest to make folk psychology deterministic. In another sense, and very much against Freud's intention, it veers toward postmodernism because, like all psychology, it is unverifiable as well as unfalsifiable—a defect which is, as we have seen in Chapter 3, aggravated rather than attenuated by the postulation of the unconscious, even though it was not intended to be so. At the same time, Freud falls foul of modernism because for modernists the postulate is an illicit attempt at evasion of testability and a strategy to make psychology immune. But he also falls foul of

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postmodernism because for postmodernists the postulate is an inadmissible and politically tyrannous attempt to search for a signified which is independent of the signifier and to which the signifier ought to be seen to be referring. Freud, modernist that he was, had certainly been looking for what the eloquence signified, even though he kept postulating that in most cases that signified was not immediately visible because it was unconscious. In the end, the conclusion that our mental events are eloquent constructions at best—constructions according to the rules of a language game—comes close to the postmodern position and shows that, where psychology is concerned, that position is almost, if not completely, correct. For the eloquence our mental events consist of is indeed free-floating. It merely interprets, and does not and cannot describe or represent the neuronally caused somatic markers which are so noticeable inside our bodies. Our conscious mental events consist of words, whereas those circuits can only be described in terms of physical equations and chemical formulas of which we are most decisively not conscious.17 Being free-floating, this eloquence is like a text which asserts something, but the assertions do not correspond to anything and their truth cannot be ascertained by their reference to anything outside the text. Such texts, therefore, are both exposed and vulnerable to what has become known in postmodernism as deconstruction. Such deconstruction, though inevitable, is always at one's peril. There was a time when it was believed that all talk about mental events could be ascertainably related in a one-to-one correspondence to states of mind, just as talk about stars and rocks could be seen to refer to stars and rocks, and talk about matters or events which could not be so related to ascertainable matter and events was idle and metaphysical talk. These expectations, in which eloquence about minds were treated like eloquence about stars and rocks, proved, however, unfounded and came to be disappointed. It turned out that there was nothing present which could be taken to be the signified subject matter of the eloquence which makes up the content of our minds—nothing other, that is, than the inchoate rumblings we become aware of and which are caused by the neurons inside our bodies. As far as the mind is concerned, the belief that there is a presence turned out, as Derrida never tires of proclaiming, to be metaphysical.18 It was difficult enough, almost impossible, to meet the modernist expectations where stars and rocks, quarks and photons are concerned. And when one takes as dispassionate a view of mental events as I have tried to do in Chapters 1 and 2, it was found that though we must and can talk about mental events, we cannot point to corresponding events to demonstrate that such talk is justified or correct. As we keep on interpreting our somatic

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markers, the signified does indeed, as postmodernism has it, slide under the signifier, so that the deconstruction which is at our peril is all that we are left with. As Hegel, well before postmodernism, put it in his Phenomenology of the Mind nearly two hundred years ago, there is nothing (or nothing much) to be seen behind the curtain unless we ourselves first step behind it so that we are there to be seen.19 His only trouble was that he thought this insight into the nature of our consciousness also applied to pursuits other than doing psychology. Whether we hold with Derrida or Hegel—this conclusion places all psychological affirmations and reasonings squarely into the camp of postmodernism. Neither neuroscientific achievements nor Freudian subterfuges can make any difference to this conclusion. The former can lead only as far as the somatic markers and the latter amounts to a postulate which is scientifically inadmissable. However, since the former leads to somatic markers which are present, even though they are so inchoate that they cannot yield direct eloquence, they offer a challenge to the postmodern contention that the belief that something is present is metaphysical. And equally, the latter offends the scientific modernism which states that all talk must be about something. We are therefore left with an understanding of psychology which lies in an uncharted no-man's land between modernism and postmodernism. Such an understanding of psychology does no credit to psychology, but since we cannot do without psychology, we ought to be doubly clear as to its risks and shortcomings and we must accept and pursue it as a very impure form of reasoning. Since it takes place in uncharted territory, the best and the most one can do is to try to explain how and why postmodernism emerged in reaction to modernism, thus fixing at least the two extreme margins in between which psychology has to take place. MODERNISM When Bacon envisaged that the commonwealths of the future would be a New Atlantis, he imagined that all forms of idolatry would have disappeared. By idolatry he meant the confusions occasioned by false beliefs, superstition, uninformed guesses, and vague generalizations. One way or another, this modernism was based on at least three fundamental assumptions: First, that there are representations in our consciousness; second, that these private orders can be made public by appropriate signs; and third, that there are things or events in the world to which these words unequivocally and unambiguously refer. The viability of all three propositions guaranteed that the resulting picture of the world would be a true likeness, not distorted either by the mir-

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ror itself or by the subject or mind engaged in constructing it. One could sum it all up by varying the later democratic formula, "one man, one vote," to "one word, one thing." All this was underpinned by the assumption that the observer, literally, did not exist or, better, that although he obviously did exist, his existence was of no consequence to his observations. My omission of the now customary amendment of "he" to "he or she" is calculated and not the result of male chauvinist custom; for since the observer was alleged to be of no consequence, the gender of whoever is of no consequence does not matter. The object, in other words, could be taken aboard and the subject who is doing the taking aboard by using a transparent language as a medium might as well not have existed at all. The project of the Enlightenment was rarely and never directly expressed in these crude propositions, but I would not hesitate to describe them as the unwritten formula which stood behind the entire project. Even in the physical sciences it took another 200 years after the annus mirabilis for the crucial role of the observer to surface and even then that role, though seemingly crucial, remains without gender: It makes no difference whether Schrodinger's cat or Wigner's friend is male or female. Let me briefly glance at a few examples of the project. Adam Smith believed that everybody would know what their self-interest is and that the pursuit of self-interest, by the operation of the invisible hand, would result in benefits for all. This idea was based on the assumption that people could formulate their self-interest in so many words and so exclude behavior or feelings that are not self-interested. For them to be able to do this, they would have to be very clear about the distinction and be able to articulate it. Against this, Karl Marx suggested that society ought to be reorganized so that everybody contributes according to their abilities and receives according to their needs. Again, this project was based on the tacit understanding that needs and abilities could be measured in so many unequivocally referring words. If we turn from political theory to pure philosophy, we find very similar assumptions. Kant, more than any other modern thinker, had payed attention to the role of the subject both in knowledge and in action, but he had neutralized it by his demonstration that the dictates of reason made all subjects act and know in identical ways so that they did not really count as uniquely subjective individuals. He believed that all tutelage, far from being inevitable, is self-incurred and that we cannot go wrong if we have courage to use our reason and reject directions from others.20 In a less sophisticated manner, the once famous Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin, writing in the twentieth century, put it very disarmingly: "Our common stock of words embodies all the distinc-

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tions men have found worth drawing and the connections they have found worth making."21 Or consider G. E. Moore of the Cambridge Apostles fame, from whom an "incorrectly employed word or an ambiguously distended infinitive . . . would draw a gasp of astonishment as at some shocking obscenity; he was incredulous, scandalized [and] gazed at the speaker as if one or the other must surely be mad."22 Even more striking was the idea of the Vienna Circle that it was possible to represent the world in so many protocol sentences which would be so neutral and so transparent that they would simply mirror in so many words what the world out there was like. It is of course true that the Enlightenment and the modernity it produced has a great many more facets than this democratic "one word, one fact" formula. By these standards psychology cannot be accommodated. The essentials of modernism are that meaning and reference are inseparable. Propositions "mean" the facts they refer to. When there are no facts, propositions can have no meaning. Psychology, it was argued in Chapter 1, is the science of states of mind and of their connections and interconnections, causal or not. By the standards of modernism, a psychologist or psychological analyst ought to be able to trace the etiology of any state of mind to its true source. This implies that the true source can, ultimately, be as known as the state of mind it causes. Our description of states of mind and their alleged sources does not permit this kind of modernist analysis. Let me briefly recapitulate: We have on one side the circuitry of neurons and the inchoate moods they produce. We are aware of those moods, but in the sense of "being in a mood," not in the sense of "being aware of a specific mood." On the other side, we formulate, as indeed we must if we want to relate to other people and know who we ourselves are, a set of psychological propositions. This is the manufacture of eloquence about those neuronally generated moods or somatic markers. But since the moods are not known in the sense that they are identifiable as this or that, any proposition about them must forever remain hypothetical. It does not make sense to call it false, at least not for certain. What we call psychology, therefore, is a set of propositions which describe states of mind as well as the causal relationships between those states of mind. But these propositions are constructions of the moods. They do not stand to the moods in a causal relationship. That absence of causal relationship is not just due to the fact that we are ignorant or too dumb to be knowledgeable. It is due to the fact that since the moods do not carry sufficient precise information, the eloquent propositions we manufacture about them and which constitute our conscious minds are related to them in a hypothetical way and must be seen as mere interpretations of them. It is possible to make

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true (i.e., falsifiable) statements as well as false statements about the neurons. We can say that certain circuits generate adrenalin, we can measure the quantity of serotonin present in some synapses, we can ascertain the electric currents in the neurons which lead to chemical reactions in the synapses; and what is most important, we have succeeded in identifying specific circuits of neurons for specific sensuous stimuli and we know in many cases of the maps that are formed in the brain as a result of those stimuli. But—and this is the crux of the matter—these scientific propositions about neurons remain within the realm of chemistry and physics. At no point do they lead to or legitimize psychological propositions about the moods they generate, even though we are aware of moods in the sense of "being in a mood." I stress this last expression with its word "in" in order to indicate that "being in a mood" is not a cognitive state where a subject knows what mood he or she is in. If the subject does know, he or she is conscious of whatever he or she knows, but such conscious knowledge is no more than an interpretation of the opaqueness of the mood. Further, we can make correct statements about the eloquence that is being manufactured. We can say that a person or that our own ego has a state of mind of hatred or of fear or of resentment of his parents or of her tribe. We can then ascertain whether that proposition about the person's eloquence is true or false. Here we get into a slightly equivocal situation, because the person about whose state of mind we are making a proposition can deny that we have described the state of mind that is being avowed by him or her correctly. We can then either proceed to accept this denial or brush it aside and cling to our own description. This uncertainty is equally present when we are making a statement about the eloquence we ourselves have manufactured about our own eloquence. But as long as we remain within the realm of manufactured eloquence, it is possible, in principle, to make true or false statements about the eloquence that has been manufactured without confronting the question of whether that eloquence is a true or false description of the somatic markers it is alleged to define and identify In the case of chemicophysical propositions about the neurons and in the case of propositions about manufactured eloquence we are within confines where the standards of modernism can be applied: Somebody is saying something about something and such sayings are either true or false. But when we turn to the relationship between the eloquence that has been manufactured and the moods or somatic markers the eloquence is supposed to refer to, we are in a different realm. Here we have eloquence (i.e., propositions) on one side and events to which they are taken to refer on the other. But the reference cannot be tested. It can

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neither be verified nor falsified, for the simple reason that it refers to nothing in particular. The reference is itself a piece of the manufacture and only when the manufacture is complete are we in a position to state what it refers to. The article it refers to is itself a product of the process of reference. We have, in other words, a signifier that creates the signified and a signified that would not be detectable or identifiable without the signifier. Here, clearly, we have left the confines of any modernist theory of knowledge and have entered a realm in which only a postmodern theory of knowledge can help. Psychology, in other words, is postmodernism's dream in which the signified slides forever under the signifier and in which the signifier precedes the signified. Indeed, I argue that postmodernism applies above all to psychology and, what is more, to psychology alone. If psychological reasoning, including Freud's psychoanalytical reasoning with its determined and dogged determinism, can only proceed according to postmodern standards, this does not say much in favor of psychological reasoning and the so called science of psychology. However, since we cannot but reason psychologically—for we do have conscious states of mind—we ought, at least, to be very wary of its tentative, unverifiable, nonreferential, and nonfalsifiable nature. Freud's theory, as distinct from his profound and masterly psychological insights and epigrams, was an attempt to salvage psychology for modernism. He tried to provide a conceptual framework in which the signified had an existence of its own and in its own right and in which the signifier was a true signifier in the sense of modernism; that is, in the sense that it was true if and only if it referred to the signified and false if and only if it failed to do so. But given the nature of the psyche and its manifest inaccessibility, he could only carry out his salvage project by postulating that there were unconscious signifieds to which the signifiers might refer, albeit more often than not in a very roundabout way. This was a philosophical enormity because, as Popper rightly pointed out, with the concept of the unconscious the entire psychological enterprise was removed from the sphere of modern science to the spheres in which there was nothing but theology, astrology, and alchemy. It therefore proved impossible to salvage psychology for modernism. This impossibility, nothing less and nothing more, was Freud's sin. By comparison it does not really matter whether he invented data, misconstrued case histories, was lacking in personal integrity, or was guilty of the circularity Griinbaum charged him with. Since psychology as such is the postmodern science par excellence, the attempt to make it an ordinary modern science was condemned to failure. Freud's project, which began with his own Project and led, after its abandon-

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ment, to his theory of repression and of the unconscious, was an attempt to do the impossible. Nevertheless, he deserves full credit for trying, for psychology is something we cannot do without and which, long before the rigorous standards of modernism were formulated by Bacon, Locke, Kant, and Comte, had been in common and general use. Mankind, in other words, had been abiding by postmodernism long before modernism, let alone long before postmodernism. Critics, with the notable exception of Popper, have dwelt on Freud's faults without addressing the heart of the matter because they felt there was something wrong. The long and short of the matter is not Freud's faults and misdemeanors, but that modernism cannot tolerate let alone accommodate any psychology, vulgar, Freudian, or other (i.e., a science in which there are only signifiers; a science about events that do not really take an identifiable shape before they have been constructed). Typically, modernists have never been able to resist the temptation to posit "facts" which are referred to and meant by psychological propositions. Either they insist on using behavior as the "facts" referred to or they point to neurons which generate consciousness. According to Crick, consciousness equals the forty-Hertz oscillation of a subset of neurons in the cortical system.23 Others slapdashly assume that neuronal events come complete with labels glued to them and, therefore, that once we have the neuronal events we ought to drop the verbal labels.24 Others again believe that personal introspection will reveal what the real "facts" are that our states of mind are about.25 THE RISE OF POSTMODERNISM What, then, are the credentials of postmodernism and its standards of knowledge? Are they good enough to establish psychology as a science? The credentials are not good at all, because they are based mainly on an ideology-driven exaggeration of some very justified and reasonable criticisms of modernism and in particular of the modernist assumption that the world consists of a number of facts and that the sentences we speak or write about make sense or nonsense according to their correspondence to those facts. To start with, one can gain an impressionistic overview of the difference between modernism and postmodernism by considering a number of jokes or epigrams. 1. In modernism, relations between facts and propositions must be so tightly constructed that not even a fool can get them wrong. They must be foolproof. In postmodernism, the relation is so loose that not even a sane person can get them right. The world is saneproof.

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2. Oscar Wilde said that in the modern world people are most likely to believe you when you say the opposite of the truth. Postmodernist that he was, Samuel Becket showed in his plays that people will not believe you even when you are speaking the truth. 3. In his Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin presented himself as anxious because he was an underdog people imposed on—a very rational reaction. In our postmodern time, Woody Allen presents himself as anxious even though nobody is imposing on him. In his movie Hannah and her Sisters, he justifies his anxiety in one scene by claiming that he keeps hearing the phone ringing. When it is pointed out to him that the phone is in fact ringing, far from being comforted, he whines, "There you are. I told you I can hear it!" Nietzsche was the first critical thinker to give precise shape to his disillusionment with the modernism which relies on a firm and unequivocal connection between facts and propositions about those facts. Generally speaking, Nietzsche was suspicious and more radically emancipatory than either Marx or Freud. Marx contented himself with being suspicious of the reasoning of the master. Freud suspected the conscious mind and its ratiocinations, but was prepared to give full credence to the unconscious, provided its appetites could be identified. Not so Nietzsche. He thought that the unconscious was as suspect as the conscious, and the slave as suspect as the master. This general attitude determined his specific critique of the nature of language's relation to the world. For Marx and for Freud, the slave's intentions and the drives of the unconscious were capable of literal description. In their view, it was only the tactics of the master and the deceits of the conscious mind which had to be decoded. In this sense, both Marx and Freud belonged with modernism because in a deep sense they shared the confidence that language can give unequivocal and literal descriptions of at least some things and that words can, at least in some cases, be a purely transparent medium. It was only Nietzsche who radically questioned this confidence in the transparency of language. His thoughts on this subject appeared most clearly in his On Truth and Falsity in the Ultramoral Sense of 1873.26 There cannot be, Nietzsche argued, any adequate, let alone correct, description of the world because words which express the perception and the events that cause the perception belong to entirely different spheres. Words and things are incommensurable and there is no way in which words can hook unequivocally into things. At best and at most, there can be a "stammering translation," something we would now call a metaphor. Every word, he wrote, becomes a concept because it is not supposed to refer exclusively to the experience it is supposed to refer to. For if it did so

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refer, it could not be used for communication. We have to pretend that it refers to other things as well and thus make it into a concept, but every concept arises from equating unequal things. With these and similar considerations, Nietzsche undermined the modernist confidence that language is a neutral medium which can carry unambiguous and unequivocal information about the world. Instead, he argued, "truths are illusions which we have forgotten to be illusions; they are metaphors which have become worn out and drained of their sensuous force."27 All language is metaphorical, except that in all too many cases we have forgotten that it is. Reference is always oblique, never straight. The locus classicus of such purely metaphorical reference is to be found in Mallarme: A metaphor comes into being, he wrote, "when step by step an object is evoked in order to show up the tone of a state of mind."28 In our own days, Nietzsche's trenchant criticism of the belief that there is one word for every fact was artlessly repeated by Derrida's insistence that every word we use ought to be sous rature. We need the word, Derrida observed, but since it does not refer to a detectable fact it ought to be crossed out. As one might expect, modernists have never taken this lying down. With or without direct reference to Nietzsche, philosophers have continued bravely to battle to vindicate their belief in the transparency of language by examining the notion of reference in countless different forms, from Frege in the late nineteenth century to Dummett in our own times. It is no exaggeration to say that the question of reference is considered to be the most esoteric and refined sphere of philosophy, reserved for its real virtuosi. Remembering the sledgehammer arguments of Nietzsche, it is no surprise to find that finally, in 1988, Stephen Schiffer, one of those virtuosi, threw in the towel and admitted that an account of reference is impossible.29 But Schiffer and many others who have admitted this impasse are no Nietzsches; they merely admit that they are not clever enough to find an account of reference. They do not grant that there can be no such account because the phenomenon commonly referred to as "reference" does not exist. In their view, even metaphors refer, albeit via the entirely subjective state of mind of the referrer. In reality, as Nietzsche most probably would have pointed out, a metaphor does not really refer because its separate parts mean one another more than an outside event. A rose means love as soon as love means a rose. The relation is reversible. The later Wittgenstein eventually reformulated Nietzsche's critique. This reformulation remained on Nietzsche's side, but it was couched in a form in which it came to be exaggerated and exploited by Derrida to become an ideology. Unfortunately, it is in this ideological form that it has become the basis of postmodernism. Nietzsche had observed

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that words and things are "unequal" and that for this reason the "one word, one fact" formula of modernism cannot hold, let alone establish the meaning of words by looking at the things they are supposed to refer to. The later Wittgenstein took up this idea and reformulated it. He pointed out that the meaning of words does not depend on what they refer to. If it did, he argued, the things referred to would have to be given a name or be designated by a word before any reference of the word to them could become apparent. Such name giving would obviously lead to an infinite regress because we would always have to establish the meaning of the word we use to name the thing referred to by the first word, and so on. Wittgenstein said that we cannot go behind language; that is, we cannot attach words to things. We can only compare a word with another word. Meaning derives from the usages of language, not from the way language refers to things.30 This applies especially to the somatic markers we claim our eloquence to be about.31 The heart of this argument does not really go beyond anything Nietzsche had said, but the reformulation, either by design or by accident, shifted the emphasis. The way Wittgenstein put it amounted to saying that we cannot establish the meaning of a sentence or a text by finding out what its author intended when he or she said or wrote it. For if we did, we would have to do so in so many words. That is, we would have to formulate another sentence and allege that it referred to the author's intention. This conclusion is implied by Wittgenstein's contention that since we cannot go behind language, meanings cannot be defined ostensively; that is, by pointing to the object or event the spoken word is alleged to refer to. Clearly this applies to chairs and even more so to the somatic markers, for to point to the object would presuppose that we have the object we are pointing to "in mind." That would require another ostensive definition, and so on, ad infinitum. For Nietzsche, reference to the world could only be made by metaphor and, if its reference to the world was oblique, it was full "of sensuous force" and made up by its poetic suggestiveness what it was lacking in unequivocal directness. The stress on the sensuous force included the subject's feelings as much as the characteristics of the world referred to. But in Wittgenstein's formulation that we cannot go behind language and can only compare words with other words and sentences with other sentences, this potential of metaphor was either lost or swept under the carpet or relegated to a forgettable region. Not that Wittgenstein himself, when he really got desperate, was not capable of metaphor, as when (in the Philosophical Investigations) he spoke of "the echo of a thought in sight."32 All the same, Wittgenstein, like Nietzsche, was a modernist rationalist to a fault, as when he kept insisting that the propositions of logic, though tautologies, are the very best philo-

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sophical thinking can produce.33 Or when he maintained that the final delivery of philosophical thought is no more than the totality of the elementary propositions which are to be accepted by science without further proof.34 All the same, Wittgenstein knew that what really mattered in our lives were our subjective states of mind, but as long as we think exclusively of literal descriptions one must agree with him that they are indescribable as they stand in the raw. Unfortunately, he never contemplated the possibilities and potentials of metaphor to make them, nonliterally, effable. For this reason, Wittgenstein's modernism kept him aloof from psychology. By his standards of knowledge, psychological sentences could not be in the running. But then came the rub that led to full-blown postmodernism after all. Wittgenstein, like Nietzsche, had remained firmly in the ambits of modernism. He hated the Vienna culture of equivocations and double entendres, of ambiguities and allusions, so well described by Musil's The Man Without Qualities and by Schorske in Fin de siecle Vienna—all confusions so necessary for the survival of the multicultural and disparate strands of the Habsburg empire.35 But unlike Musil's antihero, Wittgenstein was not interested in the reasons for the survival of that empire. On the contrary, to remain in the ambit of rational modernism Wittgenstein had to provide an explanation why and how and which sentences are meaningful. Since the modernist assumption that they are meaningful because they refer had proved deficient, Wittgenstein had to provide a different, nonmodernist explanation. He came up with the explanation that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the rules current in any one linguistic community or any particular Lebensform. There is indeed a lot to be said for this view, for even our understanding of metaphors, let alone of simpler sentences, depends on established rules. Metaphors are formed by breaking these rules, but if the rules were not known a metaphor could not be perceived to be breaking them and would then be mistaken for a literal description, albeit one without meaning (i.e., without reference). Wittgenstein's alternative definition of the way speech manages to have meaning is neither unreasonable nor irrational and was forced on the later Wittgenstein because he appreciated Nietzsche's observation that words and things are "unequal." It also commended itself because, not prepared to allow for the ubiquity of metaphors as such, such a definition was one sure way of disallowing the employment of those metaphors which broke nonexisting rules. But with the elevation of any speech community or language game or Lebensform into the only and ultimate arbiter of meaning, we can see how Wittgenstein's reformulation of Nietzsche's idea was driven upon the razor's edge to a point where it took very little to turn it into the

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irrational and unreasonable contentions of postmodernism. From the summit reached by Wittgenstein, we can see the postmodern conclusions reached by Foucault and Derrida stare us in the face; or, as we might also put it, from Wittgenstein's sharp ridge a precipitous descent into the ideology of postmodernism was more than likely. Wittgenstein's conclusion that meaning cannot be defined in terms of an author's intention and that it derives instead from obedience to prevailing rules of speech was readily reformulated by Derrida to mean this: When we are confronted by a text, since its author, as Roland Barthes had put it, is "dead" (a clever rhetorical rephrasing of Wittgenstein's observation that meaning cannot be defined in terms of an author's intention), we have no choice but to interpret it exclusively in terms of the meanings defined by the relations in which its several parts stand to one another.36 According to Derrida, texts are free-floating and nobody's property and not even their authors can have a monopoly as to their meaning. It is needless to add that even living authors are deemed to be dead. The rest depends on a reformulation of Wittgenstein's suggestion that sentences, if they do not derive their meaning from the things they refer to or represent, derive their meanings from their obedience to the prevailing rules. Instead of pointing to rules, Derrida maintains that meaning is a function of the relations among representations, rather than of the relations between representations and the things represented. This slight shift of emphasis might have sounded innocent enough to Wittgenstein, and it certainly agreed with Wittgenstein's own rejection of the possibility of establishing any meaning by ostensive definition, but it ceased to be innocent when Derrida added that these relations did not depend on rules which were knowable. For if they were knowable every text would have a determinable meaning. Derrida's shift of emphasis changed Wittgenstein's theory of meaning. For Wittgenstein, the rules were known, but only to the members of the particular speech community, while the intentions of the author of the text—not that they could be ascertained anyway—were of no consequence to its meaning. The rules themselves differ from community to community and are the result of spontaneous emergence, and hence are unpredictable and not criticizable. For Derrida, whatever the rules, they do not determine the meaning of the text any more than the intentions of its author do. As a result, a text ought to be subjected to what he calls deconstruction: Its meaning can be gauged from the relationships of its parts.37 Such meaning differs markedly from the meaning it carries on its surface to the eyes of an innocent reader or listener. The deconstructionists, however, keep falling into a trap they themselves have constructed. In theory, a deconstruction of a text is quite an interesting experiment to discover

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what words can mean in defiance of authorial intentions. Words do indeed have meanings which derive from their relations to other words and which are not always obvious to their author or speaker. This is so especially when a text is read by somebody who belongs to a culture other than the original speaker, but is also the case when a person whose private experiences differ from those of the speaker is listening to or reading them. In order to carry this experiment out, there has to be a consensus that at least the meaning of one of the words to be compared with the others is stable, but the possibility of such minimal consensus is expressly rejected by the deconstructionist's contention that it would amount to a logocentric fallacy. If, as genuine deconstructionists maintain, all words change their meaning incessantly, nothing much can be revealed by attempts to determine the meaning of any one word or expression in relation to the rest of the text. Any such deconstruction, in this case, will be like trampling on quicksand—a neverending and endlessly confusing discourse about nothing in particular. When the surface meaning is deconstructed, there is endless room for interpretations of the relationships of the parts of a text. All the many exercises in deconstruction one cares to look at turn out to be poverty stricken and disappointing because they usually reveal no more than even an innocent reader would have surmised to have been the author's actual intention. Reading, for example, Shelley's Triumph of Life, in which there is much talk of "water" and "erasure," one does not have to be a virtuoso in deconstruction to notice that Shelley is thinking of the indeterminate impermanence of literal and figurative meanings as well as of life itself. The surface meaning is not all that different from the deeper meaning and deconstruction shows no more than what meets the eye; that is, that Shelley was as unsure as Derrida himself about determinate and absolute meanings. All that is required is to figure out Shelley's meaning and there is no need to describe this operation, as Paul de Man does so pretentiously as "Shelley Disfigured."38 If some deconstructions are less self-serving, they are usually even more ingenuous. Look at what some leading deconstructors have made of Wordsworth's "I had no human fears." The poem is about death and this much must be obvious to any person who is able to understand English. But Geoffrey Hartman has succeeded in discovering an allegedly "hidden" meaning.39 He says that the word "diurnal" really means "die" and "urn," and that the whole line in which it occurs— "rolled round in earth's diurnal course"—is an image of earths's gravitation and therefore reveals "grave." The poem, believe it or not, when properly deconstructed, is really about nothing more and nothing less than death! In a brilliant tease, Jonathan Culler, better known for his attempts to make the merits of deconstruction palatable to anglophone readers than as a critic of deconstruction,40 suggests that Hartman might

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have gone a bit further. The line "She neither hears nor sees," he suggests, would have sounded more natural if it had read "She neither sees nor hears," in which case, to ensure a rhyme, the last line would have had to end not in "trees," but in "tears." The fact that Wordsworth avoided the natural order—seeing comes before hearing—and placed hearing before seeing proves that he wanted to avoid ending in tears. So, Culler argues, one must conclude that when deconstructed the poem is about the suppression of tears.41 But even Culler's extravagant tease falls flat because it still leaves us with the initial surface meaning which is clear to all English speakers: Suppressed tears are an even more telling sign of grief than patent wailing, which is little more than a theatrical, public display of ritual regardless of real feeling. Culler claims that such deconstruction would be going too far. Why too far, and how far is too far in this world where everything is undetermined? However far, not even Culler's imaginative tease, designed to reveal something really absurd, succeeds in scratching the surface. Whichever way deconstructionists twist and turn, all they manage to achieve is to tell us what we already knew: This poem is about death. I have taken these examples from literature because, since the practitioners of deconstruction always concentrate on literary texts, there are no other documented cases readily available. But, mutatis mutandis, the art of deconstruction can be applied with equal ease to psychology The following example is taken from a report of a murder trial in France, where a mother shot her adult son who had become a drug addict.42 The son, in a violent outburst, had refused to be "treated" for his addiction. A psychologist claimed that the son had seen the drugs as a diabolical ally that would help him to break free from the mother's love that had imprisoned him. Her wish to get him treated for his addiction was really a desire to deprive him of that ally. The son was dead and could not confirm this version of the story, but even if he had been alive and had confirmed it such confirmation would not have proved that this story—the signifier—really signified reality It would only have shown that the son told the same story. There was, as is always the case, nothing to be signified over and above the story that was being told. For that matter, even if the son had denied the mother's version, this would not have settled the matter either. It would merely have proved that he preferred a different signifier, not that there was an independent reality to be signified and which could be known so that one could decide by looking at it or listening to it which of the competing signifiers were the correct ones. The alleged absence of surface meaning is formulated endlessly in such slogans as "the author is dead," "there is nothing outside the text," "the signifier slides under the signified," or "we must liberate the signifier from the signified," all of which are used to turn the discrep-

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ancy between words and events, so astutely observed by Nietzsche, into a bottomless abyss. In this situation, all writing and all speech is subject to the vagaries of unlimited and uncontrolled as well as uncontrollable interpretation. Any text, depending on nothing but the reader, can have endlessly different meanings and all determination of any one meaning must be incessantly deferred, put off, or delayed. Running "differ" and "defer" together as if they had identical meanings is a clever play on the spelling of words which, it so happens, works in French, where the same word (differer) is used for both meanings. But English, being a more precise language, distinguishes not only in meaning but also in spelling between "differ" and "defer" and anglophone speakers who are trying to follow in Derrida's footsteps are forced, sometimes against their will, to make Derrida look positively silly. But even in the original French, it is a poor philosophy which has to fall back on the spelling of French words! Apart from the obvious linguistic obfuscations of Heidegger, Derrida's exploitation of the deficiencies of French orthography are even more absurd than Hegel's notorious attempt to justify dialectical reasoning on the ground that in German the word aufheben means "to lift up," "to annul," and "to conserve." However this may be, Derrida uses this lack of precision in French orthography to underwrite his argument that no piece of writing can have a determinate meaning because words do not refer to anything outside the text and there cannot be any rules, for if there were and if they were to act as rules they would have to be outside the text.43 In all cases, rules would constitute another text and, far from acting as rules for the original text, would become subject to the same vagaries of interpretation as the text they were supposed to control. As a result, all texts suffer from "the nihilism of reference." With these propositions, the difference between the truth and falsity of a text disappears and so does the difference between literature and science. Silly as Derrida's arguments may sound, it has to be admitted that they are little more than a rhetorically convoluted and exaggerated repetition of Wittgenstein's insight that one cannot go behind language. It is indicative of the poverty of deconstruction that when applied, for example, to Shelley's poem it reveals not only nothing more than the surface meaning but, what is more, shows that that surface meaning is nothing other than the doctrine that texts have no permanent meaning. Such discoveries are homologous because the discovery is identical with the project. One sets out to find the meaning by deconstruction and, in the end, one finds that the meaning is that one ought to deconstruct. As explained in Chapter 3, Freud's discovery of the Oedipus complex was similarly homologous: As a young man he set out to unveil the secrets of mother nature and it turned out that the

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secret he unveiled was that boys want to unveil their mothers, a secret which he called the Oedipus complex.44 IDEOLOGICAL POSTMODERNISM In pushing the denial that meaning depends on reference or intentions beyond Wittgenstein, Derrida proclaimed that the belief that there is signification is a logocentric delusion. Derrida's formulation of what constitutes a logocentric fallacy pushes Wittgenstein's idea over the edge and changes it into an ideology. If we follow Derrida, a text cannot be criticized and people who do criticize are guilty of committing the logocentric fallacy. The trouble with Derrida is, as Marshall McLuhan put it in Woody Allan's Annie Hall, that his fallacies are all wrong! Being wrong, all that is left of Derrida is his ideology. Before examining the ideological character of Derrida's attack on logocentricity, let me concentrate for a moment on the concept of "logocentric." The word sounds impressive and describes the rational habit of explaining anything as the result or the effect of something else and of believing that such rational explanations are ultimate courts of appeal. In that sense I, for one, proudly confess to logocentricity. There can be no legitimate limits to logocentricity, for even if there are they would have to be justified, diagnosed, and thus set logocentrically A rejection of logocentricity must therefore be ideological and dogmatic because, by the nature of the case, it cannot and must not be logocentric. Nietzsche was logocentric because his explanations of the nonreferential but metaphorical nature of language were the result of the rational reflection that words and things are unequal. Wittgenstein was logocentric because he thought it necessary to provide a rational explanation of how words got their meanings in terms of rule following if they could not get meanings from ostensive definitions or by sounding their authors' intentions. But I must grant that Wittgenstein did have difficulties with logocentricity. While it is perfectly rational to derive meaning from the rules that govern usage in any one community, one is brought up sharp against the problem as to how one set of rules or one community relates to another. All Wittgenstein came up with is the belief that each set of rules is a "spontaneous" emergence.45 In other words, he thought that no further explanation of the rules is possible. The world is simply made up of so many different sets of rules and that is that. For Wittgenstein, all meanings are relative to a special Lebensform or culture and these cultures are absolutely final. There is no metanarrative to connect them, to allow us to judge whether one is better than another, and to explain how and why one differs from another. However,

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inside any one culture there are rules and we can judge what is being said and written by these rules. It is clear that Wittgenstein's view of the status of these rules, when he described them as "spontaneous emergences," was lacking, if not in clarity, then in explanation. With this idea, Wittgenstein showed himself to be of a Linnaean frame of mind, for Linnaeus too had believed that the world is made up of so many species and that these species have existed ever since they were created by God. In other words, both Linnaeus and Wittgenstein rejected the possibility that there might be an overarching explanation of why there are so many different species or so many different sets of rules. An explanation of the reasons for the differences in terms of the story of the Tower of Babel would be such a metanarrative. An explanation of these differences in terms of derivations or evolution would be another metanarrative. I do not know what Wittgenstein thought of the Tower of Babel, but I do know what he thought of Darwin. He remained skeptical of evolution because, he said, it was not possible to watch how speciation actually occurred.46 In Wittgenstein it is difficult to know what came first, the distrust of an evolutionary metanarrative or the resigned belief that the diverse sets of rules were final and had emerged spontaneously. Whichever way, the two ideas go together. Wittgenstein remained uneasy about metanarratives; that is, about the origin of the rules that determine meaning. A metanarrative, evolutionary or not, would have to be a text in a hierarchically higher community and could not itself be part of the community it seeks to relate to other communities. The meaning of such a metanarrative could not be determined by whether it followed the rules inside any given community. If all possible communities are on an equal footing, they cannot be compared with one another in terms of a rule that belongs only to any one of them. There must be a super-rule or meta-rule. It takes a very special kind of community, the rules of which allow the framing of a metanarrative which links one community in an explanatory manner to other communities. No community can be autarchic and the existence of every community must relate to at least one other community. In Wittgenstein's world, where a set of rules is a spontaneous (i.e., inexplicable) emergence, there can be no super-rule to account for these emergences. I would like to quote here a significant statement by Wittgenstein: "I have finally struck the rock-bottom foundations of my convictions and one could say of those foundations that they are supported by the entire building." 47 1 have never come across a more concise or more witty summary of the postmodernist contention that our speech and our knowledge neither reflect nor are determined by the world outside language; that is, by the things they are supposed to refer to or purport to be about and that

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such absence of reflection or determination makes everything one says and thinks completely relative to the position one happens to be in. Let us now turn to the postmodern conclusions of this train of thought. To begin with, Wittgenstein's aphorism is true of the ways we do psychology and applies not only to convictions. Every time we strike the rock-bottom of our somatic markers we realize that when we are saying what they are our verbal interpretations of them are not supported by them but are imposed upon them by hypotheses derived from the universe of discourse we partake of. And since they are not supported from the bottom, they can only be imposed hypothetically— something Wittgenstein failed to stress. In contrast to Wittgenstein, Otto Neurath was unnecessarily pessimistic and wrong, at least where psychology is concerned, when he wrote that "we are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components."48 True, we are at sea as far as the somatic markers are concerned, but we can interpret them from the firm high point of a dry-dock with the help of words which owe nothing to the markers themselves but are provided by a language game we are participating in. The postmodern conclusion that there is nothing outside the text and that we can read anything we like into any text is absurd. Nobody, with the possible exception of Gertrude Stein, writes a text without supposing that it refers to something or that it conveys his or her intentions. Gertrude Stein may today sound a little old-fashioned, but her often quoted view that a rose is a rose is a rose has recently been repeated by Umberto Eco in the famous sentence which ends his book on roses, "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus," which is nothing more than an elaborate Latin rendering of Gertrude Stein's observation: "The rose is nothing but a name, and naked names is all we ever get hold of."49 Eco had the right instinct to put it in Latin, for in the lapidary locution of that beautiful language, almost anything sounds profound! Admittedly, it might be difficult to establish what it is words refer to and it is certainly true that many texts, and often the very best, have meanings far in excess of their author's intentions, but the idea that texts have neither referential nor authorial meaning and are nothing but texts is so absurd that it makes us suspect that we are here dealing with an ideology. What are we to make of people who are writing such a text without regard for their own authorial intention and without the wish to refer to something? When people are writing or speaking without referring to something beyond the text, they are said to be "constructing discourse." Since such discourse has neither referential nor authorial meaning, it cannot be judged in terms of truth or falsity according to whether it refers correctly or conveys its author's

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intentions. We must take it that it is obviously constructed to be used ideologically; that is, to persuade somebody to think or do something they would not normally do or believe. The trouble is that in psychology we always hoped that we could do better—or at least better than Gertrude Stein and Umberto Eco think! All the same, one has to admit that there is more than a hint of a problem here and it applies preeminently to the doing of psychology Any so called intent would have to be stated in the form of language. As soon as this is done, one is left with two verbal statements (i.e., the original expression and the description of the intent). The one thing that is still missing is the intent as such. As always, language is not capable of expressing or corresponding to anything, let alone to so nebulous a phenomenon as an intent. There is, therefore, a sense in which it indeed makes sense to say that any intention is constructed rather than described and that the signifier precedes rather than follows the signified, paradoxical though this may sound. At best and at most, language can reflect or refer obliquely, but this is more than is admitted by Gertrude Stein and Umberto Eco. The second conclusion refers to the absence of a metanarrative or, as we used to say in modern times, to the absence of critical rationality. With this second conclusion that there are no metanarratives which could explain how texts or their interpretations are related to each other, we enter the realm of manifest nonsense. For critical rationality to be applied to a text, one needs, first, critical rationality (which is, if you like, a text) and, second, the text it is supposed to criticize. Using, for example, evolutionary discourse, there is the meta-text which contains the theory of evolution and the text which describes a species. These two texts must be related. If they were not, there could be no scrutiny of the second text by the first. Derrida's argument that texts cannot be so related and that there cannot be an overarching metanarrative is circular. Derrida first defines meaning as a relation between parts of the text. Then he points out that a super-rule or metanarrative by which one could judge the adequacy, not to mention the truth, of these relations would force one to suppose that there are meanings other than those defined by the relations of the parts of the text. And then he invites us to believe that he has proved that there can be no such superrules or metanarratives. But since he has defined meaningfulness as the relation in which parts of a text stand to one another, he has actually presupposed what he had set out to prove; that is, that a metanarrative cannot be meaningful. The argument is patently circular and therefore nonsensical. Derrida does not stop here. He follows this up with the proclamation that any attempt to establish that a text has an absolute meaning in terms of truth by reference or of precision

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in terms of authorial intention is a logocentric presumption or (as the more politically oriented postmodernists put it) an act of terrorism or rape by which expression they want to convey their conviction that it ought not to be done. Edward Said adds that this logocentric presumption is not only rape, but the sort of rape perpetrated only by European imperialists on indigenous and especially on allegedly "oriental" people.50 He forgets that if it is rape it is not confined to what European imperialists have done to "others," for this kind of logocentricity has been used by Europeans against themselves. Similarly, Foucault argues that the Enlightenment's pretense to abide by rationality was—given the absence of valid and justifiable logocentricity—nothing but the display of the naked, brutal, and arbitrary power of a police state.51 If one defines an ideology as a set of beliefs which have next to no rational or evidential justification but which are nevertheless fervently embraced because they serve the interests of the people who embrace them, then these postmodern stances of Derrida, Foucault, Said, and Lyotard are clearly an ideology. They are derived, via Wittgenstein, from Nietzsche. It is clear that their Nietzschean roots themselves are rational and legitimate criticisms of the naive modernist belief in the transparency of language and of the mindless objectivity of the knowledge it communicates. In the hands of Wittgenstein these rational criticisms of modernism are pushed to an extreme edge. Though they remain rational reformulations of Nietzsche's ideas, they were given a twist into uncertainty by Wittgenstein's failure to relate the sets of rules either to one another or to something else. In the minds of Derrida, Said, Lyotard, and Foucault, they have gone over that edge. No wonder that Freud, when he realized long before Derrida that psychological reasoning might be like the sort of "text" Derrida says all texts are and that the only thing one can do about such texts is to deconstruct them (for it signifies nothing because the signified always slides under the signifier), endeavored to maintain reason and logocentricity. He stubbornly held to the modernist conviction that when one is saying something, something is being signified and that whatever one is saying is true if it corresponds to what is being signified. He thought he could do so only by postulating that there were unconscious states of mind which determined the real meaning of conscious states and which stood in a causal relationship to conscious states. As I said before, he wanted to salvage psychology from death in quicksand. The irony is that he diagnosed psychological reasoning for what it was long before Wittgenstein and Derrida had done their bit. Freud was determined to protect it and to drag it away from postmodern deconstructive activities long before they had ever been enunciated as the last resort of what one can do with a text when it signifies nothing.

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And then there is the further and final irony: His attempt to salvage psychological reasoning from the quicksand was a failure because the postulation of unconscious causes, no matter how well meant and designed to make psychology more, not less scientific, pushed it even further into the quicksand of endless speculation and uncertainty. With Freud's failed rescue attempt we are forced to the conclusion that psychology forever was, is, and will be postmodern. Nevertheless, there is a subtle difference between the standards set for psychology and the standards set by postmodernism for all knowledge. According to the tenets of postmodernism, the meaning of propositions cannot be established in terms of anything they refer to. It is indeed an error to believe that there is anything they refer to and Derrida never tires of reminding us that the "metaphysics of presence," meaning the metaphysical belief that there is something present other than texts, is erroneous. While psychology conforms to the epistemological standards set by the postmodern denial that there is anything "present" one can refer to—for the mere chemistry and physics of neurons and the somatic markers they produce can hardly be said to be "present" as so many discrete events we can talk about folk-psychologically— psychology departs from these standards in one important respect. There is, after all, a sense in which, in psychology, there is something present. The neuronally induced somatic markers or moods are present. Hence, there is a difference between saying, as postmodernism does, that there is nothing texts and manufactured eloquence refer to and saying, as every conceivable psychology must, that there are neuronal events and somatic markers. The difference is quite subtle and is little more than a shift in nuance. Pragmatically, since the psychologist cannot identify the somatic markers produced by the neurons, his eloquence does not refer to them. It merely interprets them. For this reason, for all practical purposes, psychological statements, like Derrida's texts, have no outside reference. In this sense Derrida is right when he calls the belief that there is something present, the metaphysics of presence. But since there is something present which the states of mind interpret, they are not like Derridaian texts. In psychology, if anything, the uncertainty and quicksand is much worse than in postmodern attitudes to texts. Since the postmodern treatment of texts is final and since, in the postmodern view, there is nothing a text refers to, a deconstructive approach cannot create unease or anxiety. Deconstruction is all one can do with a text. Not so in psychology: Though what is present cannot be gauged or grasped and, ungrasped and ungauged, remains forever elusive, it is nevertheless there. For this reason it makes perfect and unavoidable sense to ask of a psychological statement whether it it true or false.

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This is so in spite of the fact that the truth or falsity can never, under any circumstances, be ascertained because the reality it may or may not correspond to, though it exists, is beyond anybody's ken. More correct, we would say that it is not really beyond our ken, but that all there is and all that can be seen is the physics and chemistry of the neurons which throw no light at all on the verbal definitions and labels (the manufactured eloquence) we provide for the inchoate buzzes the neurons produce. So, while there is something present it is not causally related to our states of mind. Again, it has to be stressed that it is beyond anyone's ken not because we are not clever enough to see it, but because by its nature it is a set of inchoate feels which, in their raw state, escape verbal labelling: They contain insufficient information to allow an unequivocal choice of label. Postmodern literary scholars can play around deconstructively with every text to their heart's content because that play is predicated on the conviction that the text does not refer to anything outside itself which is present. Psychologists are not so lucky. Though they too keep manufacturing eloquence, they must ask themselves whether they are using the right words, because there is something present that is being labelled and interpreted by those words. Psychologists have to keep on asking that question even though they know that by the nature of the case there cannot be an answer. The uncertain and purely interpretative relationship between the silence of the neurons and the manufacture of the eloquence which alone can break that silence obliges us to accept the postmodern rather than the modern standard of what is good knowledge. In psychology the thing talked about is created by the talker's talking and for this reason it is true, as postmodernism alleges, that the signified slides under the signifier. This is an uncomfortable situation and it is very doubtful whether, given this situation, we are entitled to call psychology knowledge, let alone scientific knowledge. Whichever way people have turned, they cannot get beyond this uncomfortable situation in which the thing that is being talked about does not precede the talking, but follows it. Behaviorism, which would change that situation, is not psychological; nor is neuroscience and cognitive science. Behaviorism is concerned with behavior and not with states of mind; similarly, neuroscience and cognitive science are concerned with the chemistry and physics of neurons, not with states of mind. For good or ill, we are, when we are doing psychology, caught in the meshes of a postmodern theory of knowledge. What is more, we cannot even avoid doing psychology because we have to identify our feelings and moods as well as those of other people and, unable to avoid doing psychology, we have to keep doing it by the standards set by postmodernism. Seeing that

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people have done so for thousands of years and long before those standards were defined, this is not a bad thing. As long as there are cultural guidelines for the manufacture of eloquence, it does not really matter whether the events we are eloquent about precede the manufacture of eloquence or not. Even in times of brittle culture, both Jane Austen and Stendhal managed perfectly well to manufacture eloquence. Jane Austen took her guidelines from eighteenth-century conventional morality; Stendhal, from his experience of Napoleon. The fact that folk psychology, even though it has no better legitimization than is provided by the dicey standards of postmodernism, is inevitable if one wants to survive, is well illustrated by a thought experiment. Let us consider Buridan's apocryphal ass. That ass starved to death because he was standing between two equally succulent stacks of hay that were equidistant from him. Unable to make up his mind which stack to eat first, he died of hunger. His brain was sufficiently simple to register incoming signals precisely and to generate only somatic markers which were sufficiently low key not to distract attention from the incoming signals. He had nothing to go by over and above those signals and since they were completely equivalent, he could not act. Thanks to folk psychology, humans are more lucky. To start with, they too will be unable to decide which way to turn first, though for a different reason. They cannot reach a decision because their neuronally caused virulent somatic markers do not carry precise information to dictate which way to turn first, even when the two stacks are of unequal appeal. In order to allow a decision, the neuronally generated buzzes will have had to be interpreted. With folk-psychological eloquence up their sleeve, humans can indeed interpret these markers and do not have to starve to death because of indecision and disorientation. While the opportunities for manufacture are, as postmodernism correctly has it, well nigh endless, they are in practice limited by the existence of cultures which provide the information which the somatic markers are lacking in. Unlike the luckless ass, a human is almost certain to be a member of a culture, say, of left-handed Tantra or of a right-wing party. In the first case, the word "left" would be more appealing to him or her and more likely to be used for the manufacture of eloquence than most other words. For this reason, his or her culture will guide him or her to manufacture an eloquent statement about the somatic markers to the effect that the stack on the left is preferable and, therefore, to be eaten first. In short, the postmodern psychological uncertainty is attenuated, in practice, by a culture which provides a recipe for the manufacture of eloquence. The fact that psychological reasoning is subject to postmodern rather than to modern standards, though creating epistemological un-

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certainties, is, given the ubiquitous presence of cultures, no effective impediment to the pursuit of folk-psychological reasoning. The real trouble with these postmodern standards of knowledge is that they are ideology driven and taken to apply to fields other than psychology. And, being ideology driven, they also put a deleterious stamp on psychology itself. Let me take these points in turn. First, the postmodern contention that in all cases talk and text precede or create the thing talked or written about is taken to apply not only to psychology (where it is eminently applicable) but to all spheres of knowledge, including physics and anthropology In all these spheres this contention is demonstrably wrong. The contention starts with the reasonable realization that the observer's role affects what is being observed and then proceeds to the unreasonable conclusion that therefore whatever is being observed is nothing but the creation of the observer and, therefore, relative to the observer. This conclusion is wrong as well as unnecessary, because even though observations are observer oriented they can be compared with one another and those that explain more can be preferred to those that explain less. For this reason, there is no occasion to abide with the relativism that results from the fact that observations by themselves are relative to an observer. One can go beyond such relativism and, if one does not, one only has oneself to blame. Even though the postmodern contention of absolute relativism is wrong, it is pushed by many writers and thinkers and is finding ready acceptance by an ever widening audience because it is driven by an ideology. What then, in the end, is this ideology? It is the ideology of diversity. Postmodern standards of knowledge encourage, justify, and promote diversity for diversity's sake. There are a number of good sociological reasons for such promotion. The old imperialism of universal customs and moral habits failed to address the needs and personal identities of individual persons, and hence came a desire for the justification of individual or collective diversity A postmodern philosophy provides justification of diversity because it not only puts the subject at the center but contends that the subject's pronouncements and judgments are the only possible pronouncements and judgments. The view that all knowledge and all moral habits are relative to a subject and that one cannot find a way beyond such relativism is wrong. Pace postmodernism, metanarratives which connect all conceivable positions are possible. The argument that they are neither possible nor legitimate has been shown to be circular and has to be dismissed. This fatal flaw in postmodernism—and this is why it is ideological—is brushed aside and arguments against it are ignored rather than examined because

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the argument serves the purpose of promoting diversity. Such postmodern relativism wipes out the distinction between literature and science, between fact and fantasy, between knowledge and ignorance. As Lyotard often puts it, the chants of the Cashinahua are equivalent to the theory of relativity: Both are subjective affirmations which validate the position or, possibly, the culture of the person making the affirmation.52 What we please to call science (i.e., knowledge about the real world), Feyerabend preached, is simply the "mythology" current in Western society, not different from the mythologies current in nonWestern societies.53 The lure of such and similar views is hard to resist when people are struggling for emancipation from male dominance, from Western empires, and from bourgeois values. In psychology, where the events referred to by the eloquence have no existence apart from the eloquence—or better, where they exist but do not carry sufficient information to make any difference to the kind of eloquence that is manufactured about them—there can indeed be no distinction between literature and empirical psychology. Freud himself was very aware of this lack of distinction, but trapped by his attempt to drag psychology away from these postmodern standards of knowledge, he was often a little naive about the relevance of literature. Thus he asked once, after he had seen a play by Schnitzler, how it was possible for Schnitzler, who had never made any clinical studies of people, to know so much about them: "You know through intuition," he wrote to Schnitzler, "really from a delicate self-observation, everything that I have discovered in other people through laborious work."54 Freud might have made a similar comment on Ibsen's dialogue between Hilda Wangel and Masterbuilder Solness in which it is made clear that there is no clarity as to who took the initiative in the kiss. Was it Hilda's wish to be kissed or Solness's seduction of Hilda? How, Freud might have asked, could a mere man of literature have come to an understanding of such deep-seated uncertainty which it had taken him years of meticulous clinical observation to discover? The answer is, of course, that Hilda's wish is a manufactured state of mind and that such manufacture can be done as readily by a man of literature as by a clinical psychologist for one cannot tell good psychology from bad psychology in terms of a correspondence to reality. However, even though all states of mind are due to the manufacture of eloquence, the postmodern pressure which does not even allow a difference between good manufacture and bad manufacture, is impoverishing and stultifying. It is true that Schnitzler and Ibsen were as good at psychology as any laboratory or clinical psychologist, for psychology is not a science of the realities of the functioning of our nervous systems, but a manufacture of eloquence. Such eloquence is freely constructed and does not

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portray anything. However, it does not follow, as the ultrapostmodern Feyerabend has it, that anything goes. For there is a criterion by which we can tell well manufactured eloquence from badly manufactured eloquence, even though this criterion has nothing to do with a manufacture's corresponds to reality. On the contrary, the very freedom of such constructions furnishes a criterion by which we can distinguish good constructions from bad constructions. Constructions which reflect their genesis from opaque neurons via somatic markers and the consequent flimsiness of their cognitive status, are realistic because they are tentative and hypothetical. Those that are stubborn, dogmatic, and obsessive must be hallucinations because they do not reflect the fact that all they can be is mere tentative interpretations of neurologically generated somatic markers. Given this criterion, there is no need for Freud's misguided attempt to salvage psychology by postulating unconscious causes in order to be able to distinguish between states of mind in terms of their correspondence to a reality which has been repressed into the unconscious. Our ability to tell good manufacture from bad manufacture follows from a realistic appreciation of the merely interpretative relationship between neuronal events or their somatic markers and the eloquence which defines one's states of mind. If the eloquence is manufactured either freely or according to the cultural constraints available to the manufacturer, seeing that it is not causally determined by the somatic markers, it follows that the manufactured interpretations of the somatic markers must be interchangeable. Almost any marker must be open to a wide variety of interpretations. Therefore sanity or mental health consists of the ability to avail oneself freely of the possibility of switching interpretations and of substituting one kind of eloquence for another. This conclusion goes directly against the view that sanity and mental health consist of a "correct" appreciation or assessment of how things are; that is, of reality. At the end of Chapter 3 it was argued that, in spite of the fact that psychological eloquence is not manufactured to correspond to and describe neuronal events and their somatic markers, there is a perfectly good way of distinguishing between sanity and insanity. A person is insane if he or she cannot get away from any one particular manufacture. Sanity or mental health, it was argued, consists in the freedom to change one's manufacture, not in the correspondence of one's states of mind to a reality. Following Szasz's terminology used at the end of Chapter 5, we would say that sanity consists in the ability to switch language games rather than in an exclusive ability to take an active part in any one such game. However, even inside one and the same game it is a sign of sanity if one has the ability to discuss one's own interpretation of one's neuronal events or moods with other people and to modify one's own

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self-identification after and through discussion with their interpretations of one's moods. Insanity, on the other hand, consists of the absence in such an ability or in an absence of an ability to switch language games. A person who constructs himself in the image of Napoleon or who imagines that he is Napoleon is not insane because we can prove that he is not Napoleon or because we consider that any imitation of Napoleonic behavior is insane because it is socially dysfunctional. He is insane if and only if he is lacking the freedom to snap out of his construction and substitute a different construction. Once we shift the criterion of distinction between mental health and mental illness from an alleged reality principle to the notion of freedom, the distinction is solid and ceases to be arbitrary. Postmodern psychologists, starting with R. D. Laing and reaching a high pitch with Michel Foucault, do not see it that way. They conclude from the insight that eloquence is manufactured and that there are no ascertainable psychic facts over and above those that are posited and construed by the manufacture of eloquence that there is no rational way in which one can distinguish sanity from insanity, mental health from absence of mental well-being. They conclude, therefore, that any attempt to discipline or confine let alone "punish" a person for what is alleged to be insane behavior is an arbitrary exercise of power perpetrated by people who have the power to oppress people they happen to dislike or disapprove of. Thus, R. D. Laing argued that the only difference between a psychiatrist and an insane person is that the psychiatrist has power and the insane person has no power. If the power structure were reversed, he said, mental hospitals would be full of psychiatrists and society run by people who used to be alleged to be insane. Foucault has pushed this kind of reasoning to its ultimate extreme. He has very cleverly exploited the fact that, historically speaking, the definition of mental illness has varied from epoch to epoch and from culture to culture to prove that there is no such thing as mental illness, but that there are always people who oppress other people and that, when they are doing so in the name of medical rationality, such oppression is particularly reprehensible because there is no such thing as medical or any other rationality. Logocentricity, he might have added, is either pretence or delusion. Foucault's correct denial that one readily can tell the real from the unreal does not justify his conclusion. In the present argument there is a distinction between sanity and insanity in terms of the degrees of freedom people have to switch their interpretations of their somatic markers and, if need be, to change the language games in which they want to engage in. Some people are more free than others to do so and, for this reason, one must think of degrees of sanity. Whether people

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who show a total lack of such freedom ought to be disciplined or punished is another matter. If they do no harm to other people, there is every reason why they should be left as alone as both Laing and Foucault advocate. If they do harm, they may have to be dealt with according to the law. The fact that they are insane need not play a great part in such a way of disciplining them. In any case, this last question is a matter of political and social pragmatics and does not affect our ability to make a distinction between sane and less sane people. The LaingFoucault position which denies the phenomenon of abnormality is untenable. Against the Laing-Foucault campaign to abandon our view of what constitutes mental health I would like to draw attention to the infinitely more subtle and more practical proposals of Thomas Szasz, who argued more than thirty years ago and has done so ever since that, far from treating anguish or anxiety or compulsions as illnesses to be cured or, if no cure is possible, as occasions for discipline, one can assist people who suffer anguish or compulsions or undue anxiety by helping them to shift their eloquence (which includes body language) from one set of eloquence-governing rules to another set. The practice of psychological therapy or psychiatry should be based on the notion that some people suffer from an inability to be free to switch from one eloquence to another, and should not be based on the assumption that anxiety or compulsions are an illness. If there is talk of illness, it ought to concentrate on the absence of freedom and therapy should consist of promotion of more freedom rather than in an attack on the anxiety and the compulsions. We have to be very clear about this. The untenability of the LaingFoucault position does not come from any flaw in the postmodern view of the nature of psychology. As I have argued, that view is, for psychology, entirely correct. The untenability comes from Laing's and Foucault's blindness. Laing and Foucault could not see that the postmodern view of psychology does allow a distinction between abnormality and mental health. They simply went on the assumption that if there is no distinction in terms of correspondence to reality there can be no distinction at all. The denial of a distinction is unrealistic. First, it fails to make use of the very postmodern insight that eloquence is more or less freely constructed, not compelled by neuronal events. Being freely constructed, it can be changed. Second, it ignores the fact that there are innumerable states of mind which are very uncomfortable so that a refusal to avail oneself of the potential freedom which goes with them is callous and immoral. The assumption that there can be no distinction at all is wrong, for the distinction in terms of freedom can and ought to replace the old distinction in terms of correspondence to reality.

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We can see here h o w the ideology-driven postmodern view of psychology has had a devastating effect on psychology. The postmodern view of psychology as a study of eloquences that are manufactured is entirely correct and acceptable; but since it is ideology driven to promote diversity for diversity's sake, it has led its advocates into a cul-desac. In this ideology, diversity is desirable and ought to be encouraged. Since mentally ill people are different from other people, they ought to be left alone rather than helped. When they are not left alone, any constraints imposed on them and even any counselling offered are, ideologically, acts of tyranny, acts of rape, and arbitrary exercises of power. By Laing's and Foucault's standards, all diversities ought to be shored u p , protected, and idolized. If one subtracts the ideological element from the postmodern view of psychology, the postmodern view of psychology becomes not only compatible with but actually leads to the conclusion that there is a freedom criterion for the distinction between sanity and insanity. Therapy should avail itself of the merely interpretative character of the eloquence people use and can, therefore, consist of the promotion of freedom to change interpretations of somatic markers and realize that even though complete freedom to switch eloquences may be unobtainable, an increase in degrees of freedom is helpful. One should recall Freud's epigram that while there is no absolute cure, it is possible to substitute common and garden unhappiness for screaming hysteria and so enable oneself and others to work and to love. NOTES 1. Cf. Dawn Ades, "Freud and Surrealist Painting," in Freud, ed. Jonathan Miller (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,1972), 149; F. Wittels, Freud and his Time, trans. L. Brink (New York: Liveright, 1931), 101-102. 2. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (New York: William Morrow, 1928); Cf. Derek Freeman, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998). 3. H. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (London: Fontana Press, 1990), 209. 4. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 19551964), 21: 59-145 (hereafter cited as S.E.). 5. Both our standard of beauty and our faculty of love have their roots in sexual desire. See, for example, S.E., 7:156. This Freudian insight is not logically dependent on the main body of Freud's theory and echoes Plato, The Symposium, 210A-210B, in my translation: "It is necessary . . . to s t a r t . . . by going to beautiful bodies; and first... to love one single body and have beautiful thoughts about it; next, to recognize that the beauty of any body whatever is akin to that of any other body."

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6. J. M. Masson, ed., The Complete Letters ofSigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985), 364; M. Bonaparte, ed., The Origins of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 289. 7. Allen Esterson, Seductive Mirage (Chicago: Open Court, 1993), 28-29,133. 8. John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method (New York: Knopf, 1993). 9. P. Swales, "Freud, Minna Bernays and the Conquest of Rome: New Light on the Origins of Psychoanalysis," New American Review 1 (1982): 1-23. 10. E. Jones, Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 432,469. 11. Frederick Crews, "The Unknown Freud," New York Review of Books, 18 November 1993, p. 65, col. 1. 12. Cf. A. Stadlen, "Was Dora TIT?" in Sigmund Freud: Critical Assessments, Vol. 2, ed. L. Spurling (London: Routledge, 1989); H. S. Decker, Freud, Dora and Vienna 1900 (New York: Free Press, 1991); R. T. Lakoff and J. C. Coyne, Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Power in Freud's Case of 'Dora (New York: Teachers College Press 1994). 13. Karin Obholzer, The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later, trans. M. Shaw (London: Routledge, 1982); P. Mahony, Cries of the Wolf Man (New York: International Universities Press, 1984). 14. P. Mahony, Freud and the Rat Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 15. Z. Lothane, "Schreber, Freud, Flechsig and Weber Revisited: An Inquiry into Methods of Interpretation," Psychoanalytic Review 76 (1989): 203-262; H. Israels, Schreber: Father and Son (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1989); M. Schatzman, Soul Murder (New York: Random House, 1973). See also Z. Lothane, In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1992). 16. Frank Sulloway "Reassessing Freud's Case Histories," Isis 82 (1991): 245-275. Though I do not wish to defend Freud against Sulloway, I want to point out that in other sciences the relation between experiment and theory is not as straightforward as many people expect. The case of Mendel moving his plants in order to make sure that his experimental results conform to his theory of inheritance is well known. As A. R. Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, it would have been unreasonable to expect that peas actually reproduce in exact conformity with Mendel's law. See, for example, M. Ruse, The Philosophy of Biology (London: Hutchinson, 1973), 29. 17. Cf. E. Schrodinger, What is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). Schrodinger stressed that the myriads of atoms at work in our bodies are not "audible." If they were, he wrote, we could not bear it. Long before Schrodinger, Hughlings Jackson had made a similar observation. 18. J. Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 55. See also D. C. Wood, "An Introduction to Derrida," inRadical Philosophy Reader, ed. R. Edgley and R. Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 19; J. Culler, "Jacques Derrida," in Structuralism and Since, ed. J. Sturrock (New York: Oxford Unversity Press, 1979), 161. 19. G. W. Hegel, Phanomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 135-136.

224

CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON

20. I. Kant, "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklarung," Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (1784). Reprinted in Werke, Vol. 8 (Berlin: AkademieTextausgabe, 1968), 29ff. English translation in What Is Enlightenment? trans, and ed. J. Schmidt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 58-63. 21. J. L. Austin, "A Plea for Excuses," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1956-1957, p. 8. Before Austin, Otto Neurath had written in the early 1930s: "We start by purifying this ordinary language [and cleanse it] of metaphysical components . . . [so that we can] arrive at the physicalist ordinary language. A list of forbidden words can serve us well in doing this." Otto Neurath, Philosophical Papers, ed. R. S. Cohen and Marie Neurath (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 91. 22. Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1971), 200. 23. Cf. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994). 24. Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 455, and the literature cited in Chapter 1. 25. See the critical discussions in D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 65; and in D. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 26. 26. "On Truth and Falsity in the Ultramoral Sense," in The Complete Works ofFriedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 2, trans. M. A. Miigge (London: Foulis, 1911), 173-192. 27. Ibid., 180. 28. Cp. Paul Hoffmann, Symbolismus (Miinchen: Fink, 1987), 122; Peter Munz, Philosophical Darwinism (London: Routledge, 1993), 62. 29. Stephen Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). 30. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees and trans. A. Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 1, 3. 31. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), Pt. 2,197, 212; D. Dennett, "Towards a Cognitive Theory of Consciousness," inPerceptions and Cognition, ed. C. Wade Savage (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1978), 217. 32. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Pt. 2, 212e. 33. Brian McGuiness, Wittgenstein, A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1990), 253. 34. Ibid., 144. 35. Cp. Peter Munz, "Bloor's Wittgenstein or the Fly in the Bottle," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 17 (1987): 88-89. 36. J. Derrida, OfGrammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158; Cf. D. C. Wood, "An Introduction to Derrida," in Radical Philosophy Reader, ed. R. Edgley and R. Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 19,30; M. Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 34-35. 37. Wood, "An Introduction to Derrida," 19, 30. 38. See Harold Bloom, ed., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979).

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39. Geoffrey Hartman, Easy Pieces (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 149-150. 40. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). 41. Jonathan Culler, "In Defence of Overinterpretation," in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 112. 42. Dominique de Guilledoux, "Devoted Mother Who Killed Son She Would Have Died For," The Guardian Weekly, 27 May 1994, p. 14. 43. Wood, "An Introduction to Derrida," 30. 44. Cp. for example, E. Jones, Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 30-32; R. W. Clark, Freud (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), 27-28; W. J. McGrath, Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 90-91. 45. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 224e. 46. Munz, Philosophical Darwinism, 239, note 11. 47. Quoted by J. Saltzedel, "So klar wie eine Watschen," Der Spiegel, 18 May 1992, p. 264. Since Wittgenstein had no sense of humor, I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this saying. 48. Neurath, Philosophical Papers, 92. 49. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. W. Weaver (New York: Warner Books, 1984), 611. 50. E. W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Press, 1995). 51. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1975). 52. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 53. P. Feyerabend, Against Method (New York: Verso, 1988). 54. Jones, Sigmund Freud, Vol. 3, 474.

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Alter, R. A Lion in Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Beaken, M. The Making of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Bell, M. Meaning in Henry James. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Bickerton, D. Language and Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Block, N , ed. Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Block, N., D. Flanagan, and G. Giizeldere, eds. The Nature of Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. Bloor, D. Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge. London: Macmillan, 1983. . Wittgenstein: Rules and Institutions. London: Routledge, 1997. Boghossian, P. A. "Rule Following Considerations." Mind 98 (1989): 507-549. Bruner, J. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Butler, M. lane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Cairns-Smith, A. G. Evolving the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Carroll, J. Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Carveth, D. L. "The Epistemological Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Deconstructionist View of the Controversy." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 17 (1987): 97-115. Chalmers, D. J. The Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Connor, S. Postmodernist Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Crews, F. Skeptical Engagements. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. . "The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute." New York Review of Books, 1995.

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Culler, J. The Pursuit of Signs. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. . On Deconstruction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Damasio, A. Descartes' Error. New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994. Davies, M., and T. Stone, eds. Folk Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Deacon, T. The Symbolic Species. New York: Norton, 1997. Devaney, M. J. "Since at Least Plato . . . " and Other Postmodern Myths. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Devitt, M., and K. Sterelny. Language and Reality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Eagle, M. N. Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Evaluation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984. Eagleton, T. Literary Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. . The Illusions of Postmodernism. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997. Edelman, G. M. The Remembered Present. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Fish, S. Is There a Text in this Class? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Flanagan, O. J., Jr. The Science of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984. Fletcher, G. J. O. The Scientific Credibility of Folk Psychology. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. Fodor, J. A. Psychological Explanation. New York: Random House, 1968. Foucault, M. Madness and Civilization. New York: Pantheon, 1965. . Mental Illness and Psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. French, M. The Book as World: James Joyce's Ulysses. London: Sphere Books, 1982. Frijda, N. H. The Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. . "The Place of Appraisal in Emotion. Special Issue: Appraisal and Beyond—The Issue of Cognitive Determinants of Emotion." Cognition and Emotion 7 (1993): 357-387. Garver, N. Wittgenstein and Derrida. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Geertz, H. "The Vocabulary of Emotions." Psychiatry 22 (1959): 225-237. Goldman, A. I. "The Psychology of Folk Psychology." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1993): 15-28. Gray, M. E. Postmodern Proust. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Green, F. Ch. The Mind of Proust. London: Cambridge University Press, 1949. Greenfield, S. Journey to the Centres of the Mind. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1995. Gregory, R. L. Mind in Science. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981. Griinbaum, A. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Hacker, P. M. S. Wittgenstein, Meaning and Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. . "Thought, Language and Reality." The Times Literary Supplement, 17 February 1995, 8-9. Harre, R. The Social Construction of Emotions. New York: Blackwell, 1986. Harris, R. Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein. London: Routledge, 1988. Hebb, D. O. "Emotion in Man and Animal." Psychological Review 53 (1946): 88-106.

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. Essay on Mind. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1980. Hudson, L. The Cult of the Fact. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. Humphrey, N. A History of the Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Izard, C. E. Human Emotions. New York: Plenum, 1977. Jahoda, M. Freud and the Dilemma of Psychology. London: Hogarth Press, 1977. James, W. "What Is an Emotion." Mind 9 (1884): 188-205. Jefferson, A. Reading Realism in Stendhal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Johnson, D. M., and E. Erneling, eds. The Future of the Cognitive Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Johnson, M. The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Johnson-Laird, P. N., and K. Oatley. "Basic Emotions, Rationality and Folk Theory." Cognition and Emotion 6 (1992): 201-223. Kripke, S. A. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. Krook, D. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. London: Cambridge University Press, 1962. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self. London: Tavistock, 1960. LeDoux, J. E. "Brain, Mind and Language." In Brain and Mind, edited by D. A. Oakley. London: Methuen, 1985. . The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Lyotard, J.-F. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. MacDonald, C , and G. MacDonald. Philosophy of Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Margolis, J. Philosophy of Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1984. Maurois, A. The Quest for Proust. London: Jonathan Cape, 1950. McGinn, C. Wittgenstein on Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. Miller, J., ed. Freud. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972. Moravetz,Th. Wittgenstein on Knowledge: The Importance of On Certainty. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978. Morris, W. N. Mood: The Frame of Mind. New York: Springer, 1989. Mujeeb-ur-Rahman, M., ed. The Freudian Paradigm. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977. Munz, P. "Proust and Philosophy" Landfall 3 (1949): 334-352. . When the Golden Bough Breaks. London: Routledge, 1973. . Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge: Popper or Wittgenstein? London: Routledge, 1985. . "Bloor's Wittgenstein or the Fly in the Bottle." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 17 (1987): 67-96. . "James Joyce, Myth Maker at the End of Time." In Vico and Joyce, edited by D. P. Verene. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. . "What's Postmodern, Anyway?" Philosophy and Literature 16 (1992): 333-353. . Philosophical Darwinism. London: Routledge, 1993. . "The Evolution of Consciousness: Silent Neurons and Eloquent Mind." Journal of Evolutionary and Social Systems 20 (1998): 313-334. O'Hear, A. "Self-Conscious Belief." In The Certainty of Doubt, edited by M. Fairburn and B. Oliver. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1995.

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Painter, G. D. Marcel Proust. London: Chatto & Windus, 1959. Panksepp, J. "Toward a General Psychobiological Theory of Emotions." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (1982): 407-467. Pearson, R. Stendhal's Violin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Peckham, M. Explanation and Power. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979. Pinker, S. The Language Instinct. London: Allen Lane, 1994. . How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, 1997. Plotkin, H. Evolution in Mind. London: Allen Lane, 1997. Porter, R. A Social History of Madness. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988. Ricoeur, P. Freud and Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Rimmon, S. The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Rorty, A. O., ed. Explaining Emotions. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. Rose, S. The Making of Memory. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1992. Rosenfield, I. The Invention of Memory. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Sarup, M. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Sass, L. A. The Paradoxes of Delusion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Schulte, J. Experience and Expression: Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Searle, J. R. "The Mystery of Consciousness." New York Review of Books, 1997. Shattuck, R. Proust. London: Fontana, 1974. Solomon, R. C. The Passions. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1976. Starobinski, J. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Trans. R. J. Morrissey. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988. Staten, H. Wittgenstein and Derrida. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Stewart, I., and J. Cohen. Figments of Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Stone, L. "Madness." New York Review of Books, 16 December 1982. Sulloway, R J. Freud: Biologist of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Szasz, T. The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. . Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors. London: Routledge, 1977. . Pain and Pleasure. 2d ed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988. . The Meaning of Mind. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996. Tallis, R. The Explicit Animal. London: Macmillan, 1991. Tulving, E. Elements of Episodic Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Wollheim, R., and J. Hopkins, eds. Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Zajonc, R. B. "Feeling and Thinking." American Psychologist 35 (1980): 151175.

Index Abreaktion, 181 Algolagnia, 41 Alvarez, A., 30 The Ambassadors (James), 56 Anarchy, psychological, 155-156; end of, 181 Anna O. [Bertha Pappenheim], case of, 77-79 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 36 Antisemitism, 129 Aristotle, 164 Auden, W. H., 188 n.53 Aufheben, notion of, 208 Austen, Jane, 50, 51, 56, 60-61, 6263, 65, 67, 70,105, 216 Austin, J. L., 196-197 Author, death of, 207-208 Autobiography, problem of, 53 Autosuggestion, 151,161 Awareness, mere, 11,16,18,19, 21, 25, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 38,41, 42. See also Buzzes; Feels; Moods; Phantasm; Qualia; Somatic markers; Wriggles Bacon, Francis, 195, 200

Barthes, Roland, 205 Baudelaire, Charles, 14,19, 30 Behaviorism, 215 Bernays, Minna, Freud's relation with, 191-192 Bloom, Harold, 64 Body, Freud's conception of, 65 Bond, creation of, 169 Bowie, M., 129 Breuer, Joseph, 77-79, 86,136. 173 Bunge, Mario, 102 Buridan's ass, 216 Buzzes, neuronal, 14, 21, 26, 33, 38, 40,162,165,166,176, 215. See also Awareness; Feels; Moods; Phantasm; Qualia; Somatic markers; Wriggles Case histories, Freud's, 102-103 Causality, concept of, 82,110; absence of in psychology, 197 Chalmers, David, 15, 24-25 Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 9, 25 Charcot, Jean Martin, 77, 86-87,129 Chomsky, Noam, 71 n.28 Churchland, Patricia Smith, 8,11, 39

232

INDEX

Churchland, Paul, 23, 81, 83 Circularity in psychology, 104-107, 150,181 Clark, Ronald, 43 Cognitive psychology, 39 Cognitive science, 18, 31, 38, 81, 43, Color perception, 19 Compulsiveness as criterion of insanity, 119-121 Computers, advent of, 12 Comte, Auguste, 200 Confession, Catholic, 152 Confessions (Rousseau), 52 Confidence, creation of, 166 Confirmability psychological, 98100,104,106,149 Confrontation of consciousnesses, 166-167 Consciousness, 6-13, 27-31, 43; articulate, 31-34; defined, phenomenon of, 32-33; evolution of, 15-17; Freud's notion of, 76; hypothetical nature of, 22-26, 96-97,151,162; language, 31-34; modern, 179-180; ontological status of, 39-43; origin of, 8-9; stream of, 20-21; uncertainty of, 37, 40,162 Conscious states, 38 Cooper, A. M., 103 Copenhagen interpretation of QM (quantum mechanics), 108 Cowper, William, 30 Crews, Frederick, 103,192 Crick, Francis, 23, 200 Culler, Jonathan, 206-207 Cure, notion of, 176 Damasio, Antonio, R, 13,19,21,29,31 Darwin, Charles, 74,103, 210 Davidson, Donald, 39 Death instinct, 90 de Beauvoir, Simone, 153 Deconstruction: concept of, 194, 205, 214; examples of, 206-207 de Man, Paul, 206 Dennett, Daniel, 29-30, 36

Depression, phenomenon of, 10-11, 23 Depth psychology, 101 Derrida, Jacques, 194,195, 202, 205, 206, 208, 212 Determinism, concept of, 76 Development stages, Freud's conception of, 69 Differer, notion of, 208 Discourse, construction of, 211 Diversity, postmodern idolisation of, 222 Donaldson, Margaret, 39 Dora, case of, 100,192 Dretske, Fred, 19 Dualism, 2, 7 Dummett, Michael, 44 n.14, 202 Eco, Umberto, 211 Ecphorization, concept of, 142-143 Edelman, Gerald M., 24, 28, 38 Edelson, M., 102 Einstein, Albert, 30, 99 Eissler, K. R., 102 Elective Affinities (Goethe), 60 Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns], 58, 163, 211 Eliminative materialism, 10-11, 81, 122 n.24 Ellenberger, Henri R, 173 Eloquence, 218; communal manufacture of, 129,154,198; interchangeability of, 219; manufacture of, Chapter 2 passim, 105,129,154, 198, 215 Emma (Austen), 60 Emotion, 13, 29, 46 n.60,163 Empirical evidence, relevance of, 102-103 Enlightenment: postmodern view of, 213; project of, 196 Epiphenomenalism, 2 Esterson, Allen, 95 Exogamy, 90 Experiments, scientific, 223 n.16 Extralinguistic meaning, 30, 31 Evolution, 210

INDEX

Falsifiability 101; of statements about neurons, 198 Falsification: criterion of, 98-99; immunity from, 192 Fancher, R. E., 76 Fantasy, 77,123 n.56; power of, 96; retrospective, 93 Feels, inchoate, phenomenon of, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8,10,11,12,14,18,19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 28, 31, 35, 37, 40, 44 n.14, 54,114. See also Awareness; Buzzes; Moods; Phantasm; Qualia; Somatic markers; Wriggles Feyerabend, Paul, 218, 219 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 57-58 Fish, Stanley, 177 Fliess, Wilhelm, 82,161 Fodor, Jerry A., 47 n.80 Folk psychology, 36-39, 63, 84,108109,155, 216 Foucault, Michel, 158, 205, 213, 220222 Free association, 180; method of, 140-141 Freedom: as criterion of sanity, 221222; of eloquence, 220-221; postmodern, 216-217 Frege, Gottlob, 4, 44 n.14, 202 Freud, Sigmund: anticipation of cognitive science by, 81-82, 83; attempts to salvage psychology by, 83; bisexuality theory of, 6667; campaign against, 191-192; depth psychology, notion of, 76, 83; discovery, the central, of, 78, 88, 94, 96,136; educational background of, 81; eloquence of, 65; empirical basis of theories of, 102-103; fantasy, notion of, 77) Goethe and, 91; Griinbaum and, 85,101-104, 106,150; homosexuality, conception of, 68-69,101; incest theory of, 68, 90; intellectual climate and, 86,113; interpretation of Proust by, 145-146;

233

language games by, 173-174, 178-179,181; leading idea of, 73-74; literature and, 64; medical establishment and, 81; modernism and, 193; obiter dicta of, 189-190, 222; ontological dogmatism of, 113-116; past, notion of, 130; pleasure renunciation theory of, 190; poetic speculation by 136,139; Popper and, 97-100,104,106; postmodernism of, 193; prose style of, 128,136; psychoanalysis, idea of, 76; psychological finesse of, 189-191; role of suggestion and, 177; science, old fashioned view of, 80-81; scientific courage of, 78; scientific misunderstanding of, 219; scientific orthodoxy of, 81,85-86; scientific reputation of, 86, 94; seduction theory of, 79, 87-97; sexuality, infantile, view of, 67; sexual repression, view of, 190; Wittgenstein and, 173 Freudian interpretation of Proust, 145 Frijda, Nico H., 28 Functionalism, 82 Gap, mind-body 23-24 Gay, Peter, 43,102 Gellner, Ernest, 168,183-184; and Hegel, 187 n.27 Ghost in the Machine, myth of the, 29-30 Gide, Andre, 128 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 60, 91,187n.24 The Golden Bowl (James), 57 Grisar, Hartmann, 175 Griinbaum, Adolf, 82, 85,101,102, 103-106,107,108,117,118,150, 161-162,181,193,199 Guehenno, Jean, 53 Habermas, Jiirgen, 114,117,161

234

INDEX

Hartman, Geoffrey, 106 Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm, 166,169, 183,185,195 Heidegger, Martin, 208 Heller, Erich, 179 Hermeneutics: method of, 156-157; practice of, 117-118 Hobson, J. Allan, 85 Homology of discoveries, 91, 208 Homosexuality, 101 Housman, A. E., 163 Hume, David, 75, 76 Humphrey, Nicholas, 16, 24 Hypotheses, unconfirmable, in psychology, 176 Hypothetical nature of states of mind, 166

Kant, Immanuel, 190,196, 200 Ketcham, Katherine, 100 Kirk, R, 14 Klein, Melanie, 100,114 Knowledge: postmodern, 218; psychological, 3; scientific, 98; subjectivity of, 193 Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 94 Kraus, Karl, 99,180 Kripke, Saul, 5

Ibsen, Henrik, 89,113, 218 Identification of mind, 165; uncertainty of, 165 Identifications, hypothetical, 167168 Identity theory, 2 Ideological nature of postmodernism, 209-222 Imperialism, intellectual, 217 Incest, Freud's view of, 87-97; Jung's view of, 90-91 Indeterminism, psychological, 149150 Individualism, Freudian, 184 Induction, problem of, 104 Insanity, criterion of, 219 Intentionality, phenomenon of, 7 Interpretations: range of, 34-35; verbal, hypothetical nature of, 30-31, 34-36 Introspection, 18-19, 39,165

Labels, verbal, 31-32, 33, 43,142 Laing, Ronald D., 158, 220-222 Language, 41; consciousness and, 67, 21-22, 23, 32; critique of 201; modern confidence in, 196-197; neurons and, 8-12, 24-26; private, 57 Language games, 167,169,170,181, 184,194; Freudian, 174-175, 180; Greek, 178; induction into, 182; Platonic-Christian, 178179; psychopathology and, 183; spontaneous emergence of, 209; Wittgenstein's notion of, 167172 Lebensform, 169,170, 204, 209-210 LeDoux, J., 46 n.60 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 113 Libido, Freud's conception of, 66, 114 Linnaean frame of mind, 210 Locke, John, 19-20, 200 Loftus, Elizabeth, 100 Logocentricity, 209, 220; presumptions of, 213 "Lonely crowd," 179 Luther, Martin, 175 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 213, 218

Jackendoff, R., 45 n.44 James, Henry, 54-57 James, William, 4, 20-21, 54, 99 Jones, Ernest, 43, 94,100,191 Joyce, James, 50, 51, 57-59 Jung, Carl Gustav, 58, 90-91,184, 191

MacLean, Paul, 35 MacMillan, Malcolm, 111 The Mandarins (de Beauvoir), 153 Mansfield Park (Austen), 61, 62 Marmor, Judd, 178 Marx, Karl, 113,196, 201 Masson, Jeffrey, 92,191

INDEX

The Master Builder (Ibsen), 89, 218 McGinn, Colin, 10 Mead, Margaret, 189-190 Meaning: concept of, 197; extralinguistic, 14; polyguity of, 58; postmodern definition of, 212; prelinguistic, 14, 31, 44 n.14; spatial nature of, 134,138; temporal nature of, 136-137, 139 Medicine, German, 81 Memory, 131-132; involuntary, 139141; the making of, 141-142; neurological theory of, 93; suffering from, 191; voluntary, 140 Mental events: character of, 42; talk about, 194 Metanarrative, 217; absence of, 212; value of, 210 Metaphor: problem of, 31; use of, 203-204 Mind: computational theory of, 31; phenomenon of, 167; stabilization of, 168; states of, 1-6,170 Mind-body problem, 4 1 ^ 2 Modernism, 193,195-200 Moods: interpretation of, 50; phenomenon of, 26, 28, 31-34, 54, 111, 142,164,166,197,198. See also Awareness, Buzzes, Feels, Phantasm, Qualia, Somatic markers, Wriggles Moore, G. E., 197 Morris, W. N , 28 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 156 Musil, Robert, 204 Myth, interpretation of, 58-59 Nagel, Thomas, 6, 85,179 Neurath, Otto, 211 Neuromythology, notion of, 24 Neuronal events, 7,13-15, 27, 32; interpretation of, 219-220; silence of, 38 Neuronal silence, rash denial of, 810, 25-26

235

Neurons: memory and, 132-133; silence of, 49, 69 Neurophilosophy, 8-9, 81 Neuropsychology, 38 Neuroscience, discoveries of, 18, 26 New science, concept of, 112-121 Newton, Isaac, 19-20, 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 75, 76, 83, 201205, 213 Night and Day (Woolf), 51 "Normal science," notion of, 180 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 62-63 La Nouvelle Heloise (Rousseau), 53 Obiter dicta, Freud's, 189-190, 222 Oblivion, notion of, 137 Ontogenetic development: in Freud, 66; in Piaget, 66 Optimism, Proust's, 144 Ostensive definition, 171 Painter, George D., 145 Panksepp, Jaak, 28 Paradigm, Kuhnian, 81 Past, its role in consciousness, 130137 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 4 Penrose, Roger, 23 Persuasion (Austen), 56 Pessimism, Freud's, 144 PET (Positron emission tomography), 8,13,17 Phantasm, 19. See also Awareness; Buzzes; Feels; Moods; Qualia; Somatic markers; Wriggles Piaget, Jean, 66, 71 n.28 Plato, 74,180,184, 222 n.5 Pleasure: anal, 14; oral, 114; renunciation of, 190-191 Plotkin, Henry, 45 n.45 Polyguity of meanings, 58 Popper, Karl R, 98-101,106,103-104, 107,108-109, 111, 118,192, 200 The Portrait of a Lady (James), 56, 57 Positivism, science and, 81 Postmodernism, 193, 200-209; credentials of, 200-201

236

INDEX

Postmodern subjectivism, 217 Preestablished harmony, theory of, 2 Prelinguistic meaning, 14, 31, 44 n.14 Presence, alleged metaphysicality of, 194, 214 Preverbal awareness, 30 Pribram, Karl, 82,135 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 61 Private access to awareness, 18 Project (Freud), 81-85, 85-86,114, 123 n.36,135,199 Prose style: Freud's 128,136; Proust's, 128-129 Protokollsatze, 9 Proust, Marcel, Chapter 4 passim; prose style of, 128,141; realism of, 139 Proustian interpretation of Freud, 146 Psyche: concept of, 163; nature of, 162; tentative nature of interpretation of, 163 Psychoanalysis, business of, 176; concept of, 76 Psychological discourse, 169 Psychological laws, 25 Psychological reasoning, 216-217; anarchical nature of, 155-156 Psychological techniques, misleading nature of, 153 Psychologists, professional status of, 158 Psychology, 1-6; folk-psychological character of, 107-108; Freudian, 193; nature of, 197, 214-215; place of, 195; postmodern character of, 199, 212, 220; science of, 64, 97,107; scientific status of, 158,195; subject matter of, 32 Psychophysical laws, myth of, 25 Qualia, 16, 23, 28. See also Awareness; Buzzes; Feels; Phantasm; Somatic markers; Wriggles

Quine, Willard van Orman, 9 Ranke, Leopold, historical method of, 160 Rat Man, case of, 112,115,192 Realism: Freud's, 136,138; Proust's, 129,134 Reality principle, Freud's, 121, 222 Reason, power of, 74-77 Recall, ability of, 132 Received view of science, 98 Reference, 5; concept of, 202; nihilism of, 208; problem of, 4; testability of, 198-199 Relativism, postmodern, 213, 217 Repression, 73-77,103,108,171 Research programs, method of, 74 Reveries du promeneur solitaire (Rousseau), 52 Ricoeur, Paul, 117 Riesman, David, 179 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 40 Roderick Hudson (James), 56 Romantic conception of consciousness, 30 Rorty, Richard, 11 Rose, Steven, 123 n.61,141-142 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 50, 51, 5254, 75, 76 Ruckmick, C. A., 28 Rule following, 167,169,172-173, 180-181, 209 Rules of language games, emergence of, 205 Ryle, Gilbert, 29-30 Sacks, Oliver, 35 Said, Edward, 213 Sanity, criterion of, 118-121, 219 Saussure, Ferdinand, 7 Scarlet and Black (Stendhal), 61-62 Schiffer, Stephen, 202 Schiller, Friedrich, 20 Schnitzler, Arthur, 218 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 83 Schorske, Carl E., 204

INDEX

Schreber, David Paul, case of, 192 Science: concept of, 76; Freud's view of, 135,137; history of, 64; nineteenth-century view of, 78, 80-82, 97; Popperian standard of, 99; postmodern view of, 218 Scientific status, claims for, 65 Scientific style, Freud's, 129 Scientistic misunderstanding, 158; Freud's, 219 Searle, John, R., 22, 28 Seduction: childhood, 67-68; theory of, 79-80, 87-97 Self-luminous awareness, 29, 33 Serotonin, 18, 23,198 Sexuality, infantile, Freud's conception of, 67 Sexual repression, 190 Shaw, George Bernard, 113 Signified, concept of, 199 Signifier, concept of, 199 Smith, Adam, 196 Social animal, man as, 164 Somatic markers, 13-15,16,17-19, 18-19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 43,44 nn.14, 47, 45 n.45, 46 n.60, 68, 111, 141,155,157,167,176, 214, 216, 219. See also Awareness; Buzzes; Feels; Moods; Phantasm; Qualia; Wriggles Speech communities, 167,177-178, 205; creation of, 168; spontaneous emergence of, 168 Spence, Donald, 160-161 Spielrein, Sabina, case of, 191 Stability of mind, creation of, 163-164 Stein, Gertrude, 211 Stendhal, 50, 51, 59-60, 61-62, 65, 67, 70,105, 216 Sterelny, Kim, 9 Stich, Stephen, 9, 39, 81 Strachey, James, 102 Strawson, Galen, 14 Subjectivism: postmodern, 217; role of in knowledge, 196

237

Suggestion, role of, 151-154,158160,162-164,177 Sulloway, Frank J., 73,155,192, 223 n.16 Surface meaning, absence of, 207-208 Symbolism, conception of, 113-121 Symbols: ontology of, 114-117; reversibility of, 114-117 Szasz, Thomas, 120-121,183, 221 "Talking cure," 173,181 Tallis, Raymond, 24, 44 n.7, 46 n.48 Testability, scientific, 149 Text: concept of, 208; postmodern notion of, 215 Therapy, conception of, 130 Time: Freud's view of, 136; Proust's view of, 135,137 Transference, 161,170 Truth: historical, 160-161; narrative, 160-161; objective, absence of, 193 Tulving, Endel, 142 Ulysses (Joyce), 57 Umschrift, 93 The unconscious, 82-87,97,171; language game rules and, 184; postulate of, 76-80,109-110,173,192, 214; unfalsifiability of, 98-99 Unfalsifiability of statements about moods, 198 Verbal definition, 215; as interpretations, 33-36; of somatic markers, 17. See also Language Verbal labels, 39; hypothetical nature of, 34-36. See also Language Vico, Giambattista, 112 Vienna Circle, 9,197 Vienna, culture of, 204; intellectual fashion in, 173 Wills, individual, battle of, 166,185 Wilson, Edmund, 128

238

INDEX

Wings of the Dove (James), 55, 56 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5,14, 36, 57, 59, 81,144,167,169,170,171, 172-174,183, 203, 205, 209, 213 Wolf-Man, case of, 177,185 Wollheim, Richard, 73 Woolf, Virginia, 51-52,156 Words: magic power of, 164; meaning of, 167; ostensive

definition of, 203 Wordsworth, William, 163 Wriggles, neuronal, 14, 24, 33, 34. See also Awareness; Buzzes; Feels; Moods; Phantasm; Qualia; Somatic markers Zajonc, R. B., 29 Zuruckphantasie, 93

ABOUT THE AUTHOR PETER MUNZ has taught medieval history at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and has published many books and papers on the thought and politics of the early Middle Ages. After studying in his youth under both Popper and Wittgenstein, he has pursued his interest in philosophy by writing several philosophical books, including The Shapes of Time (1977), Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge (1985), and Philosophical Darwinism (1993).